The Demon Crown: A Sigma Force Novel
Page 31
He leaned closer to read the handwritten notes in the map’s margin. “This section of the mine also had a name assigned to it. For a rather obvious reason.”
“What’s the name?” Sam asked.
“Kaplica Muszli. Polish for Chapel of the Seashell.”
Kat gasped out loud, picturing the prominent scallop at the center of Smithson’s tomb.
Slaski zoomed into the highlighted section. “Like I said, the choice of name is fairly obvious.”
The map showed an interconnecting loop of tunnels radiating out from a central cavern in the obvious shape of a scallop shell.
“That must be the place,” Kat murmured.
Sam seemed less sure. “Why did the miners carve tunnels like this? It doesn’t seem very practical.”
Slaski shrugged. “When we go down there, you’ll better understand.”
“Then let’s get going.” Kat checked her watch. “It’s after one. Surely the private mass is over.”
Slaski raised a hand. “First, be warned.” He pointed at the image on the laptop screen. “The Chapel of the Seashell may look tiny on the map but it actually covers a full square kilometer. Very large. And most of it is in ruins—crumbled into pieces after it was abandoned.”
“Why abandoned?” Kat asked, wondering whether this could be another connection to what was reportedly unleashed there.
Slaski had a different explanation. “That section of the mine flooded.” He zoomed out the image of the map and circled a section of the neighboring tunnels. “This is all now a lake.”
Kat pictured the vast body of water—and the giant seashell resting on its bank, as if washed ashore there.
“We still have to go,” she said, looking around to see if anyone objected.
Elena’s face shone with trepidation, but she nodded.
With the matter settled, they set off. They were soon hiking across the castle’s parklike grounds toward a sprawling structure glowing through the trees. The lights illuminated a yellow building roofed in red clay tiles with an industrial tower looming high above it. The steel erection was the old head frame for the mine, positioned over the Danilowicz Shaft, which drilled down into the heart of the excavation.
As they crossed the park, the night had turned chilly, requiring them to bundle into jackets. Kat kept a close watch for any sign of a tail. Whoever had been following them in Gdansk had never revealed themselves again once they reached Krakow. Earlier, she had only informed Painter and Jason of her intentions to head to southern Poland. She has asked the director to keep her destination secret, even from U.S. intelligence services.
Perhaps such a cover had helped them lose the tail.
But Kat remained wary.
During that call, Painter had also updated her on the situation in Hawaii. As chaos continued to spread, an evacuation plan had been settled upon, though the logistics were still being worked out. The exodus was scheduled to start in half a day. The plan was to start moving the populace via both airlifts and an armada over to Johnston Atoll. It would be a monumental undertaking, requiring international cooperation, but they dared wait no longer, not if they hoped to contain the situation and keep it from spreading globally.
Monk must have noted her consternation. “If anything’s here, we’ll find it.”
We’d better—and soon.
31
May 9, 8:10 A.M. JST
Fujikawaguchiko, Japan
This must be the place.
Seichan fought through a fog of pain to study their destination. She sat in the back of a light transport helicopter—a Fuji-Bell 204B. The namesake for this Japanese variant of the American helicopter filled the skies ahead of them. The snow-frosted cone of Mount Fuji stood out starkly against a stack of dark thunderclouds, as if the mountain were holding back the storm.
A lake below reflected that battle.
She recognized Lake Kawaguchiko. The helicopter descended toward a village along its banks. She struggled to remember the town’s name, but each beat of the aircraft’s rotors pounded in her head, making it hard to concentrate.
Once near the shore, the helicopter swung toward the town’s outskirts. As it turned, morning sunlight blazed into the aircraft’s hold. Dazzled, Seichan squinted her eyelids to slits, refusing to look away, absorbing every detail below.
The lines of a cable car climbed from the town to the summit of a neighboring peak behind it, where the panoramic views must be stunning. On the lower slopes of the same peak, a multistoried pagoda towered above the treetops. Its glass-and-steel structure reflected and shattered the sunlight, looking like a sculpture of ice and fire.
From the helicopter’s angle of approach, she knew it was their destination. She studied the surrounding area. The modern pagoda sat dead center of a walled-off square, easily encompassing a thousand acres. A score of outbuildings dotted the grounds, none taller than two stories, as if refusing to challenge the height of the shining temple.
The aircraft circled to the back of the compound where a helipad blinked with lights. Seichan noted a Japanese garden behind the pagoda, trickling with streams and waterfalls, all surrounding a large koi pond decorated with flowering lily pads. A small wooden bridge arched over the water to a tiny teahouse at the center of the island. The rest of the garden was artfully decorated with maples, cherry and plum trees, and patches of swaying bamboo. In one corner, a rock garden dotted with a plethora of bonsais framed the raked sand of a meditative space.
Seichan tried to absorb the peace and serenity of those gardens, knowing the challenges ahead. She still tasted blood on her tongue, oozing from her lip, split and swollen from Valya’s fist. Her attacker sat up front with the pilot. The woman had ignored her during the five-hour flight to Tokyo, allowing Seichan a couple of hours of fitful sleep. She appreciated the short amount of rest. The hop from Tokyo to this lakeside town had taken only twenty minutes.
From here, she suspected there would only be pain.
Even now, she felt Ken Matsui studying her from the next seat, silently evaluating her every wince, flinch, and gasp. Twenty-four hours had passed since she was parasitized. By now, thousands of larvae had molted into their second instars. In another twenty-four, they would do so again. At that point, the hungry legion would begin migrating into her bones, where they would continue their feast, while also seeding her marrow with cystic clones of themselves.
In twenty-four hours . . .
As they landed, a gust of wind struck the helicopter. The skids hit the pad hard. The impact jarred through her, enough to awaken the horde inside her. Pain burst in her lower belly and radiated through her limbs. She tried to ride out the agony, but it only grew worse. Pain rebounded from her limbs back to her stomach, stoking the flames inside her—then back out again.
Stop . . . please stop . . .
It didn’t.
At some point, she simply passed out. She woke to a clap of thunder and the icy spatter of raindrops on her face. She was on her back, strapped to a gurney near the helipad. Overhead, half the sky was bruised and dark, the other sunny and blue. The storm was sweeping in fast, propelled by cold winds.
Her gurney was rushed toward the open steel doors of a squat cement-block building. Once inside, she was escorted down a ramp to a subterranean tunnel. Fluorescent lights ran along the ceiling, blurring together as she hovered on a razor’s edge of agony. Each bump of the gurney jacked the pain up another notch.
She fought to compartmentalize that torture, to bottle it into a corner of her mind.
It proved impossible.
The pain was too variable. It was a tiger ripping through her insides, lashing out, then going quiet, only to spring again somewhere else in her body.
Hot tears ran down her cheeks. Her breath heaved in and out.
She tried to focus on where she was going, mapping a layout in her head. She suspected she was being whisked toward the pagoda, toward its subterranean levels.
At some point, she slipped into a hazy del
irium, only to be snapped back by Ken’s sharp voice. “Where are you taking her?”
She blinked and let her head fall in the direction of his voice.
Valya had Ken’s arm in her pale grip. As the gurney was roughly jerked into a passageway to the left, Ken was being dragged the other way.
Separating us . . .
Valya’s voice carried over to her. “Med ward,” she answered. “She’ll get a full physical. Including evaluating her pregnancy. With a little luck there, she’ll become our prized guinea pig.”
Apprehension swelled through Seichan, holding back the pain. It wasn’t fear for herself—but for her child. Despite the peril of the situation, she was more than willing to undergo a thorough examination. Throughout the ravages of pain, one question persisted.
Is my baby still alive?
Up until now, with all the strife and mayhem, she had pushed that worry deep down, where it had burned like a hot coal. As each hour passed since leaving Maui, the pressure of that unanswered question mounted.
She needed to know the answer.
Unfortunately, the intensity of that desire could only stave off the agony for so long. As she was shoved into an elevator, the gurney hit the back wall. The jolt struck through her like an electrical shock, amplifying the pain into a crescendo.
The world went gray—then black.
When she woke again, she had no idea how much time had passed. She was now in a hospital bed, her wrists and ankles cuffed to the frame. Someone had stripped her and placed her in a hospital gown, which was folded up to her breasts.
A pair of blue-smocked medical personnel—maybe a doctor and nurse—flanked the bed. The nurse finished swiping an icy lubricant over her exposed abdomen. The sudden chill on her heated skin must have stirred Seichan back to consciousness. The doctor held the wand of an ultrasound, while he calibrated the unit at her bedside.
“All set here,” he said quietly in Japanese and turned to the bed. His gaze noted her open eyes. “Ah, and it seems our patient is awake. She has quite the constitution to withstand Level Two pain without meds.”
Seichan ignored the compliment and merely glared at him. He was a small man with delicate features and a thin mustache. She could’ve broken him in two in a heartbeat, but even if free, she would’ve held off. For the moment, he was the most important man in the world, the only one who could settle the question aching inside her.
“Should I administer a fentanyl patch?” the nurse asked. She was a round-faced older woman with a stern expression worn into her features. “Her temperature is hovering at a dangerous level, most likely due to the pain.”
“Let’s hold off for the moment.” He shrugged. “She’s already gone this long without analgesics, and I don’t want any opioids in her system if she’s pregnant. If this scan proves to be positive, we can always induce a coma afterward.”
“Hai, Dr. Hamada.”
The nurse shifted over to the ultrasound unit, while the doctor reached across Seichan’s body with the wand of the transducer probe. As it touched her skin, the doctor turned to her, addressing her directly for the first time.
“I’m afraid this will hurt.”
“Do it,” she said.
“Very good.” He nodded to his nurse, who flipped a switch.
Seichan braced herself, balling her fingers into the bedsheet under her. At first, there was only a sharp pressure on her abdomen as the probe was rolled across her belly. Then the wand suddenly became a scalpel, carving deep into her core. She screamed, unable to restrain herself. She stared over the edge of her folded gown, expecting to see her bowels bursting from a gaping wound.
There was nothing.
The doctor’s shoulder hunched against her outburst. “The larvae are sensitive to sound waves,” he explained. “It sends them into a frenzy. What you’re feeling is them fleeing from the ultrasonic waves.”
His explanation—while intended to be helpful—only made the experience a hundredfold worse. She pictured masses of larvae ripping through tissue and muscle in a roiling panic.
“Do you need a break?” he asked.
Unable to speak, she whipped her head back and forth, like a wild horse trying to shake off a bit.
Keep going . . .
He nodded and continued his examination, drawing and quartering her with his probe. Sweat and tears flushed her cheeks. Pain blinded her. Nails dug through the sheets into the skin.
Then suddenly—when she was certain she could take it no longer—the agony ebbed. She gasped with relief, half-sobbing, too anguished to care.
“There we go.” Dr. Hamada leaned back so Seichan could see the screen. With his free hand, he pointed to a fluttering of gray pixels. “Your baby’s heartbeat.”
Still alive . . .
An indescribable joy flooded through her.
“We know second instars avoid their host’s vital organs, like the heart and brain,” Hamada said. “Luckily, your pregnancy must be far enough along for the fetus’s tiny heartbeats and minuscule brain waves to stave off the larvae. At least for now.”
Hamada must have noted her deep frown at his last words and explained: “Third instars are not as forgiving. Once they’ve ensured their genetic continuance by seeding a bone’s marrow with their crytobiotic clones, they are less concerned with the host’s survival.”
A countdown began to run in a corner of Seichan’s mind.
Twenty-four hours . . .
Hamada lifted the wand away and the ultrasound screen went dark, erasing the thin fluttering. She would have traded her right arm for another few seconds of seeing her baby’s heartbeat.
Losing the anchor of that heartbeat, she could no longer hold on. The room faded around her.
As she sank away, she heard Hamada speaking to the nurse.
“Her fetus looks vital and unharmed.”
She felt relief at his prognosis, but he was not done speaking.
“It should make an ideal specimen for the next stage of our experiments.”
8:32 A.M.
If I wasn’t so terrified, I’d be impressed.
Ken gawked at the sprawling underground lab. It dwarfed his own facilities back at Cornell, which had taken him a decade to construct through the judicious cobbling together of university grants and funds from corporate sponsors.
His tour guide—Dr. Yukio Oshiro—stood a head taller than Ken, but so thin-limbed, he looked spidery, which was fitting considering Ken was familiar with the man’s published papers on arachnid venoms.
“We’re already moving forward with Phase One clinical trials for an ion-channel blocker to treat muscular dystrophy,” Oshiro extolled, ending with an exasperated sigh. “This way.”
The man plainly resented being assigned this role.
As they continued across the circular space, Oshiro nodded every now and then to a fellow scientist, who stopped to bow more deeply in a sign of respect, which the man clearly demanded.
“Of course, we have groups working on other drugs.” Oshiro pointed them out. “Alpha Team is studying a promising analgesic. Beta, an antitumor medication. Gamma, an agricultural pesticide. I could go on and on. The potential here is nearly bottomless. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”
“And all of these compounds were culled from the venom of the ancient wasps?”
“The Odokuro, as you named them.” Oshiro gave a small dismissive shake of his head. In Japanese corporate culture, it was the equivalent of raising a middle finger at Ken. “We received a memo to start using that name. Seems you’ve won a measure of respect from Takashi Ito.”
And likely why I’m being given this grand tour.
Ken knew he was being groomed to join the staff. From Oshiro’s cold manner, the man must feel threatened.
Ken studied the place with a discerning eye. He didn’t have to pretend to admire the facility. Banks of equipment and tools filled the room. Most he knew; some he didn’t. Besides being larger than his own lab, it was far better equipped.
One side of the lab seemed devoted to studying the proteomics—the proteins and peptides—of the wasp’s venom. This was evident from the many humming banks of mass spectrometers, along with a trio of huge gel electrophoresis machines used to separate out proteins.
Still, other pieces of equipment were a mystery.
Oshiro must have noted his puzzled expression. His voice took on a gloating tone. “Over there, Alpha Team is doing flow cytometry, employing femto- and pico-second lasers to inspect and separate out advantageous-looking proteins.”
“Impressive,” he said and meant it.
“And necessary, as you know when faced with such small samples.”
He nodded. It was one thing to milk a snake for its venom, which generally produced a decent investigative sample, but it was another matter when trying to do the same with a spider—or in this case, a wasp.
Ken turned his attention to the other half of the lab, a space clearly devoted to genomics. Here, nucleotide sequencers were being used to study the RNA and DNA associated with venom production, along with gathering valuable transcriptomic data.
He knew from his own experience how tricky venom could be. What was found in a poison gland could vary greatly depending on the sex of the species, the type of food, even the ambient temperature. Sometimes it was easier to sequence the DNA and reverse-engineer the toxic peptide, rather than hunting it down.
Ken nodded over to where Gamma Team was working on a sequencer. “You’ve got some serious next-gen tech. Your lab must be capable of performing some incredible high-throughput analyses of the venom.”
“Certainly, but it’s not like we don’t hit walls.” Oshiro stared over at the group. “For example, Gamma has discovered fragments of a promising RNA transcript, including the gene that produced it—but they’ve been struggling to find the actual protein it’s supposed to synthesize.”