by John Bolin
He came to another wall. He could see a faint blue glow to his right. He kicked hard, concentrating on his torso, giving him more speed for the energy he was exerting.
He knew the air in his tank would be empty any second. He was using his oxygen only when he needed it, but that didn’t change how quickly it was leaking out. He approached the glow and—
Was suddenly under it.
He was at the bottom of another huge underwater chamber, as big as the first.
Through the wet suit, Peter could feel that the water was warmer here. A low humming sound filled the chamber—not the sound of the ocean, but a low vibration, like the sound of machinery. Bursts of warmer water and bubbles struck Peter. He looked down.
The floor of the cavern was littered with big cracks that emitted the bubbles. Seismic cracks. The floor of the cave was also covered in submerged stalagmites. They looked like thousands of fangs, hungrily waiting for someone to fall on them. He thought briefly of how Tima had impaled the donkey on a stalagmite. Under the water, these pillars of rock seemed to glisten, like gold. Probably from the odd blue light coming from above them. He looked up.
Above him, floating just below the surface of the water at the center of the lagoon, was a gigantic black shape. It looked like an enormous octopus, but with thousands of spaghetti-thin arms. At the center of the shape, a bright blue light pulsed, each time illuminating the long hair-like strands.
Peter tried to breathe in and choked. He sucked again. There was nothing left. It had to be more than 150 feet to the top. If he kicked for it, he’d be dead from the bends before he got there. His pulse quickened, his nerves were shot.
He closed his eyes. Don’t panic!
The memory shot into his mind that a scuba regulator stopped working not when the air was out of the tank but when it was unable to regulate the air. There was probably more air in his tank, but he’d need to reduce the pressure to get to it. If he could approach the surface, the lessened pressure might just allow more air to come out.
Peter swam upward, closer to the apparatus’s tentacles. As he did, he heard his regulator click on again, and he found he could breathe. He took short, easy breaths and kept moving up.
Beyond the tentacles he could see the surface of the water. It was crisscrossed with shadows. Bridges? There could be people there, maybe Gator.
One of the creature’s strands dangled toward him, stopping inches from his face.
His legs stopped, but he eased himself forward in order to dodge it. The arm looked more alien than terrestrial. It snaked around his face and body without touching him. It moved as though it were sensing him, seeing him.
Peter kicked gently toward the water’s surface. He was so close that he could almost taste the sweet air.
And then a school of silver fish came out of nowhere and blocked his way.
Peter steadied himself. The school of fish hung in the water in front of him. These were the same kind he’d encountered in the sinkhole. Only this time there was nowhere to run.
From this angle the fish looked almost mechanical. Small fins flapped on the sides of the bulbous bodies. He waved his arms out, but they didn’t move. It wasn’t normal fish behavior. He began to swim closer, and the fish edged toward him.
Though his air was flowing again, his tank was nearly empty. He didn’t have time for this. He raised his speargun. Held it in front of him, nudging one of the fish.
The fish charged him, sending him backward.
In the commotion, his speargun got knocked from his side and began sinking toward the bottom. He took a quick breath and kicked after it. As he did, he felt something on his foot. He looked back.
One of the things had bit into his diving suit, at his calf. Luckily, it was heavy-duty rubber reinforced neoprene. He kicked hard, sending the fish awkwardly through the water.
He snatched the speargun and spun around in the water. Another one of the fish was almost upon him. Peter raised the gun and fired.
The spear cut through the water and hit its target, skewering the fish like a kebab. Light burst from the fish as it twisted and wriggled on the spear. Slowly it stopped moving. As the spear sank toward to the cavern bottom, Peter was sure that he could see the fish dissolving.
“Ahhh!”
Another bite drew his attention back to the fish.
This time, the fish had bit his thigh, ripping his wet suit. It stung like crazy. Blood was everywhere. He choked for air again and tried to punch at the fish. His fist landed, but the fish scales were hard as a rock and his fist just bounced off.
The fish darted in again, this time aiming at his gut. Peter twisted and thrashed, but he was too slow. The fish took another chunk out of his wet suit. He screamed underwater, exhaling the last of his oxygen.
Blood misted from his side. He pressed his hand to his gut and kicked. He needed to get to the surface. He could fight better once he had a new breath.
In the cloudy water, the fish suddenly backed off. He could see why. They had him surrounded. They circled hungrily like a shiver of sharks. He stopped swimming. His leg and side were hidden inside clouds of blood. His lungs were about to burst. There was no way out.
Something bumped his rubber boot. He looked down and saw a greenish shape swimming to the surface, an electric eel. The killer fish let it pass.
It was his only option. He just needed to keep it away from his open wound. If it touched his skin, he was dead. Peter kept his eyes on the strange fish as he kicked for the surface, following the eel all the way up. One of the fish moved close, too close. It brushed against the eel and flashed and popped. Then, it began to sink.
Peter’s head burst out of the water, and he gasped for air. The vibrating noise under the water was replaced with a loud hum above it. He had emerged next to a floating dock.
He pulled himself up and onto the dock and rolled over to a pile of life vests. The water churned behind him. He heard voices and ducked behind the pile.
Three people strode by in intense conversation. Peter recognized the Asian woman and the bearded man from the helicopter. He waited for them to pass and then began to ease out from his hiding place.
“Stop!” a voice said.
He froze, ready to pounce. Then he realized it was coming from the Buddy Phone, still connected to his head.
It was Gator.
Chapter 19
Raul held the radio back from his ear.
“What!” Khang said on the other end. “Did you say military helicopters?”
“Yes, five of them. Attack helicopters. That’s the report I just received from our informant. They left the air base ten minutes ago and are targeting our coordinates. Our men found the American stowed away on one of our helicopters. It’s possible that he alerted them with the onboard radio.”
Raul had already sent the Indian girl and the American to the scientists. Now he was pacing on the platform of the security nest situated at the highest point in the trees. From here, Raul could see the dome and the barracks as well as most of the pathways and bridges between the trees. Eden was prepared to fend off small-scale intruders but not a wave of military helicopters. Even if they were successful at fending off the Peruvian choppers, the firepower of the U.S. military would deliver a second blow within half an hour.
“How much longer until they arrive?” Khang asked through the phone.
Raul looked at his watch. “Two hours at top speed, maybe a few minutes more.”
“Very well. Gather the researchers and meet us in the boardroom. And tell the security team to be on high alert. Clearly we have underestimated Peter Zachary.”
“Maybe but I’ve—”
“Obviously, they’ve infiltrated your security, and one of them must have somehow alerted the air base. It is fine that you have discarded the man you found in the helicopter, but I want Dr. Forsythe escorted to a secure pod.”
“Very well.”
“Raul, we cannot afford another mistake, am I clear?”
�
�Yes, sir. And what should we do if we find any of the other Americans?”
“Kill them.”
* * *
“Don’t move, Peter,” Gator said. “Hostiles at three o’clock.”
Peter eased back into the pile of life vests. He peeked out.
Two men wearing white jumpsuits passed by on a separate dock, ten feet in front of him, moving quickly. A few others followed, emptying out the place through a set of massive double doors built into the side of the cave. As the doors swung open, Peter could see two guards pulling a man along in the hallway. The doors closed again.
Linc?
He was in a natural cave that had been transformed into a high-tech facility of some kind. Lights installed into the rock walls filled the cavern with a mercury-colored haze. The cave itself was roughly circular, fifty yards in diameter, and rose forty feet in the air. The cavern floor was almost entirely filled with water.
Near the beach, Peter spotted a canal that seemed to drain from the main lagoon and empty through the side of the cave. What looked to be a hydraulic chute was closed, keeping the water contained in the lagoon.
Classical music blared above his head, some kind of opera Peter didn’t recognize. The cavern smelled of chlorine, like a city pool, and it was humid.
Around one-third of the underground lagoon was a narrow strip of white sand. Where there wasn’t beach, the water lapped up against the sheer walls of the cave. The dock Peter was on had an odd shape. It was actually one side of a horseshoe-shaped platform that extended from opposite ends of the beach into the lagoon and met in the middle of the water at a circular platform.
Someone was standing over the controls on the center island. The person moved, and Peter could see it was the Asian woman from the helicopter. She adjusted knobs and pushed buttons as she looked at an LCD computer monitor.
In the middle of the lagoon was the giant octopus creature Peter had seen under the water. Apparently, half the creature’s body was underwater while another half of it moved above the water. Long black tentacles moved and undulated in all directions, coming from a center black mass. Curiously, the creature’s black skin moved as if the skin itself were made up of tiny living particles.
One of the tentacles came dangerously close to Peter’s face. He could see that, in fact, there were tiny particles moving around the tentacles like bees in a hive. His mind suddenly put the pieces together. The only time he’d heard the term assembler was when someone referred to a manufacturing line—cars, TVs, microchips. Then, he thought smaller.
Nanotechnology—a machine that creates a machine.
The woman pressed a few more buttons, and Peter heard the loud hum slowly fade until it stopped altogether. Instantly, the long black tendrils slumped to the water. The thick black tentacles shrank and faded until they looked like thin metallic cables floating on the water.
“Assembler deactivating,” an electronic voice said.
The woman turned and waked down Peter’s side of the dock. He froze in place, staring at the ceiling. The woman walked by, too preoccupied to see him lying behind the life vests, plain as day.
Looking up, he saw that more of the strange stone spires—stalactites—hung from the ceiling. Encircling these were four massive metal pipes, almost like belts cinching the stalactites together.
He spotted Gator, crouched behind a row of tall metal cylinders on the beach.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gator said. “No telling how long they’ll be gone.”
“Not yet. We need to give it a few minutes, just in case. I’ll meet you on the beach in five. I need to check my leg.”
“Is it bad?”
Peter noticed that he’d stopped bleeding. In fact, it almost seemed like it had healed a bit as he was lying there. A think layer of skin was already forming on top of the wound. That’s weird. “Nope,” he said. “Not as bad as I thought, I guess. I’ll live.”
Gator risked a move to join Peter behind the life vests. “I think I’ve figured out what this place is.”
“Lay it on me,” Peter said. “Because I don’t have a clue what it is.”
“It’s a control room.”
“For what?”
“That creature machine thing,” Gator said.
“Assembler.”
“Okay, assembler. I watched a couple of guys go up to the panel on that center platform and do something at the controls, and the whole black mass of it started moving around in the water.”
Peter looked more closely at the circular platform Gator was talking about. It looked to be about thirty feet across and had two semicircle-shaped counters on it. Lights and digital readouts flashed on the counters. Control panels. Obviously, it controlled the octopus assembler, but maybe it controlled the robo-fish, too. Peter had half a mind to blow the thing up, but all he had with him was his speargun.
Around the perimeter of the central floating platform were some kinds of pods, like upright coffins. Each pod had a small bag of fluid hanging at shoulder height. An IV? Interspersed among the upright pods were more silver cylinders. The whole thing looked a bit like a Frankenstein movie.
Peter crinkled his forehead. “What is this place?”
“No kidding,” Gator said.
“More importantly, where’s the guy who killed Bogart? And where’s his boss?”
Peter was lying on the dock halfway between the circular platform and the beach. Something silver sparkled in the water beside him. The fish! He jumped back.
But it wasn’t the fish. A large silver globe bobbed by him—the assembler—floating on the water like a metal beach ball. The sphere was about six feet across. A hundred thin silver tubes protruded from it and dangled limply in the water. The tubes came out from various places on the ball but seemed to be concentrated on the side that currently faced the docks. LED lights imbedded in the metal flickered. But the machine, whatever it was, didn’t seem to be activated.
Good thing, Peter thought as he stood. He and Gator moved quickly but quietly across the dock to the beach. Peter was surprised at how little his leg hurt. They stepped onto the sand and ducked out of view behind one of the silver canisters.
He glanced around the cavern and back to the lagoon. He could see the assembler had apparently moved on its own. Now it was on the other side of the central platform and bobbing in the water closer to the beach, its sagging tentacles floating in the water.
“You got a plan, boss?” Gator said. “Because I have no idea what kind of swamp we’ve just stepped into.”
Peter fingered the trigger of his speargun. “The plan is to get out of this room, find Khang, and blow him off the face of the earth. That’s all I’ve got right now.”
Gator just looked at him. “You’ve got issues, you know that?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Let’s not forget,” Gator said, peeling off his wet suit, “that we’ve got Alex and Linc in here somewhere, not to mention the girl who is probably scared out of her mind.”
“Or dead,” Peter said. He breathed out slowly, looking around. Inset into the rock in the middle of the beach were two tall metal doors—shut tight. They’d try those next. Peter took his own wet suit off. His khaki pants were soaking wet and torn in places, but they’d have to do.
“Let’s stash this scuba gear out of view, just in case. Oh, and snag the Buddy Phone in case we need it.”
Peter pulled the radio from his gear and stuffed the rest between two canisters near the back of the beach, where the sand met the rock wall. He grabbed the dive knife and attached it to his leg.
“Get another radio as soon as you can and use the second unused frequency. Now, we need to go for those doors,” Peter said, looking at his leg. “Any luck and we can get lost somewhere until we can regroup. In any case, we need to get out of here. Seems too much like a central hub.”
“What is this thing?” Gator said, looking at the metal cylinder they were hiding behind.
Peter stood up and examined the tank. The c
ylinder was about five feet tall and four feet around. It had an intake valve at the top and what looked to be two outflow tubes at the bottom. A tube that snaked out into the lagoon was attached to one of the valves. The unit appeared to be controlled by a digital keypad and an LED screen with a flashing red padlock symbol. A small acetate plaque had been affixed to the metal wall. It read: Anti-Cancer: Aqueous Swarm.
“Anti-cancer,” Peter said. “Some sort of medical project, I guess.”
“But why all the secrecy and military-style security?” Gator asked. “And what’s an aqueous swarm?”
