Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  Gideon nodded.

  “Despite all our precautions, other personnel have been parasitized by the worms. We know this because of the widespread sabotage—not just the CT scanner and the X-ray machine, but the ship’s surveillance cams, as well. The whole system is down, and the vessel’s intercom isn’t working everywhere. All this is slowing down our efforts to find the worms—and identify the saboteurs.”

  “Again, I’m wondering where this is going.”

  “We must deploy the nuke now. And I mean now—within twelve hours.”

  Gideon glanced over at his workstation. “I need the numbers first. If the nuke won’t kill those underground eggs, there’s no point in setting it off.”

  “And when do you expect the numbers?”

  “Any moment.”

  “Doesn’t the computer tell you how long the calculation will take?”

  “It’s not a calculation. It’s a simulation. A much vaster scale of complexity.”

  Glinn rose. “Forget the simulation. We’ve got the weapon. Let’s use it.” He looked at his watch. “I want the nuke armed and loaded in the ROV in a matter of hours.” He turned. “Can you do it?”

  As Glinn stared at him, Gideon became aware—once again—of the obsession they both shared.

  “Fuck, yes,” he said, almost surprising himself.

  Glinn nodded. “Good.” And then he left.

  Just as the door shut, as if on cue, Gideon’s monitor chimed. The window was blinking red. The simulation was complete.

  Gideon rushed to the computer and, not even bothering to sit, began furiously calling up the numbers from the Q. The file came in slowly—it was fat—but in a minute it had loaded, numerical simulations made visual.

  A schematic picture appeared and a slow-motion video began playing, simulating the detonation of the nuke, the expanding shock wave, the massive cavitation caused by the blast, the transitioning of seawater into steam, the effect of it on the Baobab, and the impact of the leading edge of the shock wave with the seafloor and its propagation beneath.

  In a minute it was over. Still standing, Gideon now sought to sit down, placing an arm on the swivel desk chair. But something went awry; his legs were like jelly, and the chair slipped on its wheels sideways and he collapsed on the floor.

  51

  BRAMBELL HAD NEVER felt so shattered in his life. He was weary to the marrow. He sank into the chair in his clinic, eased his legs out one after the other, and leaned back. His limbs felt like lead.

  He and Sax had lost both patients, one after the other. In the first case the parasite had killed Reece while it was being extracted; in the second, Brambell had followed Rios’s recommendation and injected the parasite with hydrochloric acid, which did in fact kill it—but not quickly enough. As soon as he stuck the needle in the worm, it lashed out and killed the patient.

  After Stahlweather had died on the operating table, he’d been forced to give the near-hysterical Dr. Sax a sedative, but to prevent her from sleeping he added to it a cocktail of mild stimulants, caffeine and methylphenidate Hcl, that had put her into a wakeful but dissociated state. He had installed her in a chair in the back room of the clinic, where she was resting but not sleeping. He had checked on her several times and found she was alert enough. Not that he really believed there were worms hiding in the clinic. They had killed both worms recovered from the patients, blending them into paste and incinerating them. The cuts on his arm were sore, but they were just cuts—so far there was no sign of any exposure to toxins. Which made sense: the worm’s tooth did not have a channel to inject venom, as a viper’s fang did, nor did there appear to be any venom-containing organs inside the creature.

  His dispensary, down the hall and currently in the pharmacist’s care, had been dispensing pills all night long. The steady stream of patients had ended, and it was close to dawn. He himself had not taken the speed. He had been a doctor too long to think it was a good idea, and he was surprised and even dismayed that Glinn had ordered it. But there it was: Glinn was not someone who consulted him on decisions like this. Brambell feared the wakeful atmosphere on board the ship more than he feared the unlikely possibility of being parasitized. The stress and fear, he believed, could easily deteriorate into stimulant-induced psychosis in many crew members.

  In this ruminative state he found his eyes closing, and he jerked himself awake. Just two more hours to sunrise. What he should be doing was keeping busy, and the best way to do that was to start working on a blood test that would show if someone had been parasitized.

  Brambell had drawn vials of blood from the two patients—and if he could find something unusual in that blood, something anomalous, something not present in the blood of an uninfected person, that could be used as a blood test.

  He roused himself and shuffled over to the equipment cabinets. He would start with a standard CBC on the blood, measuring hemoglobin and red and white blood cell numbers. From there he would go on to a basic metabolic panel testing heart, liver, and kidney function, blood glucose, calcium, potassium and other electrolyte levels. Maybe a lipoprotein panel next, if nothing anomalous showed up. He hoped to God something would show up. And it very well might: surely the body would react in some way to having a six-inch parasite moving around in the brain.

  God, he was tired. Stay on your feet. You couldn’t accidentally fall asleep on your feet, he knew. Maybe he should take just half a pill…Once again, he put this thought out of his head. No amphetamines—he needed to keep his head as clear as possible.

  Removing the rack of vials from the refrigerator—he had taken thirteen vials of blood from each patient—he began sorting and labeling them for the various tests. Then he went through the equipment lockers, taking out the necessary equipment and setting it up while going through the steps in his mind. As a doctor, he normally sent tests like this off to a lab. But back in medical school at RCSI, he had learned how to do them himself. On top of that he had the Internet, and surely somewhere there he would find the lab protocols. He jacked his laptop into the ship’s network and went online. Yes: there it all was, in exacting detail.

  He would start with a simple blood smear test. He took a drop of blood from one of the vials and spread it on a gridded slide, stained it, and covered it. He put the slide under the microscope and, pencil in hand, began counting the number, size, and shape of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets per grid, jotting down the figures. But he was so tired he was having trouble focusing. He blinked, blinked again, and adjusted the focus on the stage. God, his eyes were so shot from the failed operations he couldn’t see through the eyepieces. And it had to be admitted he wasn’t as young as he once was, less able to stand up to the grueling hours he had once endured as a resident.

  He blinked again, then took some eyedrops out of the medicine cabinet and applied them to his eyes.

  Once again he gazed through the eyepieces, but it was like trying to see underwater. Bloody hell. What he needed was a ten-minute break with his eyes shut. His judgment was growing affected; he needed to be sharp in order to continue the tests.

  He glanced at the chair. Could he close his eyes without dropping off to sleep? But a quick ten-minute nap hardly seemed dangerous and, in fact, might work wonders. The idea that there were worms lurking somewhere in the room, waiting for him to go to sleep, was absurd. There would be no danger in just a ten-minute nap; and it would do him, and the work he had to do, a world of good. The ship was huge and the clinic was small and had watertight bulkhead doors all around, which could be dogged shut.

  He went to the main door into the clinic, eased it shut, and dogged it. He shut the door to the inner lab as well. Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket, set the alarm to ring in ten minutes, and placed it on the counter, starting the timer as he did so.

  God, he could hardly wait. He eased himself into the chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. What a glorious feeling it was…

  A dream woke him: a nightmare. With a muffled cry h
e jerked awake, feeling a sudden stinging pain, a horrible rasping vibration, inside his head. His mind, confused and frightened, took a moment to clamber up out of darkness into the real world; his hands flew to his face and he felt something and he fell out of the chair to the ground.

  Good God in heaven, there was something on him. It was like a wriggling cable, hard and cold as steel; it was on his face and inside his nose. Digging into his nose. With a second muffled cry he managed to grasp the tail end of it and tried to pull it out; he could feel the thing’s incredibly strong muscles rippling in his frantic grasp as he tugged, but it wouldn’t come free. It had fixed itself inside and was working its way deeper, rasping and digging into his nasal cavity. He rolled about on the floor, hanging on to the thing’s tail with maniacal intensity, trying to keep it from going deeper, but it was too well anchored, working its way in despite his every painful effort to pull it out.

  Suddenly he felt, deep inside his head, a snapping of bone—like a finger poked through an eggshell—and then everything changed. The terror vanished and he felt a wonderful, spreading sensation of peace and contentment, and a blessed feeling of sleep stole over him: beautiful, serene sleep.

  Dr. Antonella Sax stood in the doorway of the inner lab, rubbing her eyes and trying to focus. She had heard something, a cry perhaps, although she wasn’t sure. But nothing was awry. Dr. Brambell lay on the floor, sleeping. His hands were folded on his chest and an expression of contentment lay across his face.

  She leaned over to wake him up, gave him a little shake. “Dr. Brambell?”

  No response. The poor man had been going thirty-six hours straight and was out like a light. He had locked the door and she noticed his cell phone on the lab table counting down the seconds. She picked it up. He had set it for a ten-minute nap and had two more minutes to go.

  The poor tired man—ten minutes seemed like nothing. Seeing him asleep so peacefully made her feel the lure of sleep, herself. The shot Brambell had given her seemed to be wearing off, or at least it was no longer able to counteract the tidal wave of fatigue that pressed at her mind. She was aware that her rationality was still somewhat affected by the shot, that she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she normally did—but who could be expected to, after the ordeal they had just gone through?

  God knew the doctor needed a longer rest; and so did she. What risk would there be in a half-hour nap? That would be a lot more effective than ten minutes. The door to the clinic was securely dogged. And surely Glinn’s no-sleep edict did not apply to herself and Brambell, who needed to be as sharp as possible if they were going to be effective.

  She reset the phone alarm to go off in thirty minutes, and then eased herself into a lab chair and sat back, placing her feet up on the table, closing her eyes, and falling almost immediately into a delicious sleep.

  52

  GIDEON LEFT HIS cabin and headed for mission control, where he knew he would find Glinn. As he walked down the corridor, he heard, as he passed through crew quarters, voices raised in querulous complaint. A man came careening down the hall, smelling of alcohol, bumped into him, gave him an elaborate bow, and staggered on. As he passed the open door to the crew’s mess, he saw that a crowd had gathered, talking urgently among themselves.

  He hurried on. Glinn was right: they had very little time before things fell apart on the ship, if they weren’t beginning to already. He wondered how the man would react to the news he was carrying.

  The door to mission control was locked, but after identifying himself on the intercom he entered. Glinn was there, along with McFarlane. Both were hunched over a monitor. It was a view of the Baobab from the stationary camera. It was horribly active, the mouth extruding and swelling, then retracting, as if it were exercising some grotesque sex organ.

  “The simulation is finished,” said Gideon.

  They both looked up.

  Gideon had been debating in his mind the best way to say it, but when actually faced with the task his carefully crafted explanation vanished. “It won’t work,” he said simply.

  “Won’t work?” McFarlane repeated sharply.

  “Not even close. The sediments act like a blanket. The shock wave won’t reach that cluster of brains.”

  “I don’t believe it,” McFarlane said harshly. “Bury the nuke in the mud and set it off there. That’ll excavate a crater down to them.”

  Gideon shook his head. “I already considered that. The simulation looked at various detonation altitudes above and within the seafloor. The best location is about two hundred meters above the bottom. The water pressure would propagate the shock wave to a larger area of seafloor, where it would penetrate the farthest. But not far enough.”

  “Let’s see those simulations,” said Glinn.

  “They’re on the ship’s network.” Gideon turned to the monitor, pulled up a keyboard, logged on, and ran the video simulation with all its various permutations, starting with the nuke exploding at the level of the seafloor, and then working up to a detonation half a mile above the Baobab. Each simulation showed the shock wave moving in slow motion through the water, hitting the ground, and continuing on—damping down and petering out in five to six hundred feet of depth. None of them reached the cluster of eggs, at a thousand feet deep.

  “I can’t believe it,” McFarlane exploded. “This is a fucking nuclear weapon! You’ve set the parameters wrong.”

  “No,” Gideon said. “The problem is, these deep-sea pelagic sediments are like a wet blanket. If it were solid rock it would be totally different. But it’s not—it’s like Jell-O.”

  “So what’s the answer?” McFarlane asked furiously. “What have we got more powerful than a nuke? Can we go get an H-bomb? What else can we do? This is fucked up. Why wasn’t this simulation done six months ago?”

  He halted his tirade, breathing heavily. Gideon looked at him. He felt utterly defeated. And to think he’d seriously considered reprogramming the nuke’s onboard computer so he could override an abort code, just in case the others got cold feet. What a joke. Now there was no question: everyone wanted to use the nuke. And every hour counted. But the damned thing wouldn’t be enough to kill the entity.

  Glinn spoke quietly. “Are there any options, Gideon?”

  Gideon shook his head. “One nuke. One shot.”

  53

  ROSEMARIE WONG HAD locked the door to the marine acoustics lab and was straightening up, trying to put the lab back into a semblance of order after Garza and his team had swept the place for worms. Prothero would have a fit if he came in and found it like this. Although it was just as messy when Prothero was there, he always claimed to know where every little thing was. And it was true: if she moved so much as a pencil in one of his staggering piles of crap, he would notice and berate her.

  She was deeply concerned about what was happening on board the ship. Several times in the past hour she had heard groups of people passing by in the narrow corridor outside the lab, talking in loud, angry voices, their boots ringing on the metal floor. Some of them sounded like they had been drinking, while others appeared wired from the amphetamines that were being passed out like candy.

  Where was Prothero? He had been working on his whale lexicon for much of the night, but then had excused himself and left, saying he’d be back in fifteen. But it had been almost an hour and he still wasn’t back. Had he gone to sleep, defying regulations? That would be just like him; the way to get Prothero to do something was to ask him to do its opposite.

  Wong told herself she shouldn’t be worried. Prothero maintained a completely unpredictable schedule, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, never eating in the mess but instead chowing down in the lab itself, at random times, on pizzas and sodas brought in from the canteen. He would typically kick the trash into a corner, and it would then be up to her to retrieve it, put it in the garbage, and then empty the garbage at regular intervals to get rid of the oniony smell of pizza, which she loathed…

  Once again through the door sh
e heard a group pass by; once again she heard the muffled, angry voices. This was truly disturbing. Where was security? But she knew the answer to that: Garza had commandeered them all in the search for the worms. In the meantime, the ship’s discipline was rapidly heading for a complete breakdown.

  She heard the door rattle; a gasp. “Hey, Wong! Open up!”

  Prothero. She got up, unlocked the door, opened it. He rushed in, slamming the door and locking it. He was gasping for breath, sweaty, his hair askew, sucking in air.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “The motherfuckers have gone crazy. It was only five minutes, maybe ten at most, I swear—”

  There was a sudden thundering of footsteps outside the door; a rattling of the doorknob. “Prothero? Prothero!” a voice called, with an eruption of other voices behind.

  Prothero backed away from the door. “Tell them I’m not here,” he whispered to Wong.

  Wong swallowed. “He’s not here,” she said through the door.

  “Bullshit!” came the reply. “We know he’s in there. Open up!”

  A number of angry voices were raised on the other side of the door, and someone began pounding. “Who is that? Wong? Open the fucking door, Wong!”

  Prothero, terror in his eyes, shook his head at her. He backed up, casting around the lab as if for a place to hide. There was none, of course.

  “He’s not here,” she said again.

  “Listen up, Wong! He’s infected. We caught the son of a bitch sleeping. Couldn’t wake him up. He’s got a worm!”

  Wong felt paralyzed. She glanced at Prothero. He didn’t look right, but then he rarely looked normal.

  “Are you listening? He’s infected! Get your ass out of there and let us take care of it!”

  Prothero shook his head, mouthing no, no, no.