“I’m sorry about Higgins,” Naomi said quietly. Preston only nodded. Naomi was about to say something more when she saw something on the floor down the aisle the harvester had been in. “Oh, my God,” she breathed as she stood up and went to look closer.
“Naomi?” Jack called, following behind her.
“Oh, no,” she muttered. “Oh, no!”
“What, dammit?” Jack demanded.
“This,” she said, picking up from the floor what looked like a ridiculous toy ray gun that would have been a perfect movie prop for any of the “B” science fiction movies from the nineteen-fifties. The only difference was that this one was connected by a hose to a cylinder about a foot and a half long and six inches in diameter.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s an SJ-500 gene gun,” she told him, nearly in tears. “Those cartridge-like things I picked up in the first vault? They were cartridges, all right: for this.” She looked up at the storage boxes, the hundreds, thousands, of boxes around them. “They’ve been in here, infecting some of the seeds with whatever’s in these cartridges.”
“The retrovirus?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, not with this. This is used to inject genetic material into cells. The retrovirus is handled differently. The tank holds highly pressurized helium that shoots the gene material into the target animal or plant. We’ll have to take the cartridges back to the lab and analyze them, but if I had to guess, I’d say that it’s either a kill gene, a gene that will cause the next generation of plants to spontaneously die, or maybe will create some sort of flora that’s native to them, like a food source beyond the...protein we know they consume.” She took a tool out of her pocket and disconnected the gun from the hose.
“They haven’t been in here very long,” Jack observed. “They couldn’t have infected very many.”
“That may not be true,” Preston said. “Look at this.”
Jack and Naomi came back over to look at their captive harvester.
“It’s wearing civilian clothes under its uniform,” Preston said, pulling up the camouflage shirt to reveal a thick gray sweater. Undoing the belt and fly, he pulled the thing’s uniform pants down to expose insulated blue pants.
“Oh, my God,” Naomi whispered. “It’s been masquerading as one of the workers in here.”
“Then it must’ve put on a Russian uniform, maybe to escape with the other harvesters after they finished with the vault,” Jack surmised.
Naomi looked up at Jack. “There’s no telling how long it’s been contaminating the vaults. It could have been here for weeks, months. Or longer.” Leaning back against one of the tall shelves, she said, “Every seed packet in these boxes is now suspect. We can’t let any of them be used. Ever.”
Jack had a sinking feeling in his stomach. “So their plan wasn’t really to destroy this place,” he said. “They wanted the world to need the seeds that are stored here. Seeds that were contaminated, and that nobody would have known about.” He paused, the ramifications hitting home. “And now we have to destroy it. All of it.”
Naomi nodded as she angrily stuffed the gene gun in her backpack. “And that leaves the little question of how we do that, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “But first things first: we have to clear the last vault. You stay here and watch our little buddy. Preston,” he called to the other man, “you’re with me.”
“Jack,” Naomi called after him.
He turned to look at her, her face flickering in the dying light of the still-burning harvester.
“Be careful.”
***
Claret had turned around briefly at the sound of gunfire echoing down the tunnel from far behind them, but Hathcock never took his eyes off the closed door at the entrance.
As if on cue, the door flew open and a man stumbled inside. He wore a tattered uniform that both of them recognized as Norwegian from their time in Afghanistan.
“Hallo?” the man called hoarsely as he collapsed against the side of the entrance, the door standing open behind him, his rifle clattering to the floor. “Is anyone here?”
“Stay where you are,” Claret called. “Keep your hands where we can see them!”
“There are Russians, coming behind me!” he shouted. With a sob, he added, “Those fuckers shot down our plane. I am the only one left. The only survivor!”
“Check him out,” Hathcock said quietly as he centered his aim on the man’s chest. “Stand up!” he ordered the Norwegian.
The man, his uniform literally in rags and covered in blood, managed to get to his feet as Claret moved closer. He was within a couple meters of the Norwegian when Hathcock suddenly remembered.
“Use your imager!” he called, but it was too late.
The “Norwegian” dodged to the side as Hathcock pulled the Barrett’s trigger, blasting a huge divot out of the concrete wall where the thing had been just an instant before. With his other eye, the one not glued to the big weapon’s scope, Hathcock saw the stinger suddenly uncoil from the faux soldier and strike out at Claret.
Claret was incredibly lucky, as the sharp biological dagger slammed into the stock of his rifle, the point sticking in the hard plastic. The harvester wrenched the weapon away from him, and Claret was reaching for his sidearm when the tunnel suddenly boomed with the sound of a weapon on full automatic.
Hathcock watched in fascination as the harvester, caught between its human and natural forms, did a dance of death as it was shot from behind by another figure that stood silhouetted in the doorway. The creature was slammed against the wall, not far from where it had originally fallen, and Hathcock stroked the Barrett’s trigger. The tunnel entrance lit up briefly from the muzzle flash as the .50 caliber round blasted the harvester into flaming pieces that spattered to the floor around them.
The silhouette in the doorway resolved into a Norwegian soldier who looked like he’d been recycled through Hell half a dozen times. Claret, his thermal sight over his right eye now, turned and nodded to Hathcock. The man was human.
“Kaptein Terje Halvorsen,” the man said as he stared at the creature’s shattered exoskeleton and burning, fatty flesh, an unmistakable look of hatred in his eyes, “at your service.”
***
Several minutes later, Jack, Naomi, and Preston came back out of the tunnel, dragging the harvester they’d captured. They were surprised to see yet another harvester corpse awaiting them.
“It must have infiltrated the SvalSat station,” Halvorsen explained after they’d all introduced themselves, “I suspect as the helicopter pilot that transported the shift crews. The thing impersonated one of my men after killing him, then blew up the station.” He was silent for a long moment. “First the Russians shot us down, then that thing killed the rest of my men.”
“I don’t think it was the Russians,” Jack told him. “There were four of these things, masquerading as Russian troops. I’ll bet they’re the ones who shot down your plane.”
“About that,” someone said quietly from behind them, just outside the entrance, causing everyone to spin around, raising their weapons, “you would be correct.” The man stepped forward, looking calmly at the rifle muzzles pointed in his direction. “I am Kapitan Sergei Mikhailov of the Russian Army,” he said in excellent English. “These svolochi,” he said, nodding at the nightmare forms on the ground, “shot down your plane. They also destroyed ours, and killed most of my men when they blew up the airport terminal.” He looked at Halvorsen. “We did not come here to fight you. We were ordered to protect the seed vault from terrorist attack.”
“You blocked the runway with your bloody plane!” Halvorsen shouted.
Mikhailov nodded. “Yes, because we were lied to by…them.” He was still in denial about the biological impossibility that smoldered on the floor, and the other one that looked like a smashed cockroach that the Americans had dragged up the tunnel. “When we saw you come in here after this...thing, we could have killed you.
We did not.” He looked at Jack and Naomi. “What are these...creatures?”
“That’s a long story,” Jack breathed, worried now that it wouldn’t be long before the locals started showing up, and probably more planes from Russia and Norway. He and his team needed to be gone long before then. “We’ll tell you what we know, but first we have to figure out how to destroy everything in the vault. These sons of bitches contaminated the seeds.”
“That, I think,” Mikhailov said, “is something we can help with.”
Fifteen minutes later, they all stood around the entrance, watching as the burly Russian NCO, Rudenko, happily pumped nearly three thousand gallons of Jet-A fuel down the tunnel.
“My lady?” Mikhailov said, extending a signal flare to Naomi while Rudenko pulled the tank truck away to a safe distance. “Would you prefer the honors?”
Numbly, she nodded and took the flare. Lighting it, she stared down the fuel-drenched tunnel before throwing the flare in as far as she could. With a loud whump, the fuel ignited, and in a few seconds was burning so hot that the metal entrance doors began to warp on their hinges.
“Come on,” Jack told her, pulling her away and shielding her from the intense heat of the flames that were now roaring out of the entrance, “let’s get the hell out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Back at the base in California, something stirred in the biosafety containment chamber that had once held a rhesus monkey infected with the harvester retrovirus. The monkey was no more. Every cell of its body had been converted to a new use, given a new purpose. To feed. To grow.
The organism had no thought, no awareness, only a biological imperative to seek out what it needed to satiate its raging hunger. It was guided neither by sight, nor sound, nor smell, but by receptors on the surface of its body that were able to sense and sample on a molecular level all that they touched.
This new life, risen from the old, had no shape, no specific form. It moved by flowing, and was able to cling to any surface it touched.
Spreading tendrils from its central mass, it probed its immediate surroundings. It found the food dispenser the monkey had used, and its body swarmed over it, secreting powerful enzymes that rapidly reduced the fruit and vegetable slices into molecules it could easily absorb.
The creature’s tendrils pushed farther up the enclosure, encountering the thick rubber seals that kept the enclosure airtight. There were seals around the hatch and seals around the other penetrations into the chamber, all rich with rubber...and carbon.
It rapidly consumed the rubber, its digestive enzymes quickly dissolving it, breaking down the chemical compounds into what it needed. Then it oozed through the gaps left where the rubber had been, making its way farther into the innards of the chamber. There, it fed on the housings for the medical sensors and camera, the analysis equipment, and the other components that contained carbon. It left behind as excreta those elements it didn’t need for growth, by squeezing a dark mass of viscous liquid from its body.
In the course of its feast, as it continued to probe and digest the carbon-rich components of the chamber, it ate its way to freedom.
***
Vlad had spent the hours since the team had left for Spitsbergen helping the other scientists on the team prepare another batch of seeds to go into the vaults that had been built into the old missile silos. It was tedious work, but had to be done. Everything depended on it, and he relied on that for his motivation when he would rather have been at his microscope.
With that necessary chore done, he was finally able to return his attention to the biopsy samples he had taken from the strange lesions that had appeared on the rhesus monkey. A part of him felt guilty at having had to do that, for he loved animals. But he knew it was a necessary evil: they had to know what the retrovirus did, and the only way they would be able to find out was to see it in action. He only hoped the effects wouldn’t cause the monkey much pain.
He sat down at his workstation and called up the results for the series of tests he had programmed the biosafety chamber to carry out on the tissue samples from the monkey.
While the results were being loaded, he took a quick scan of the monkey’s blood work, which had been run every hour using the intravenous shunt in the monkey’s arm. He saw that the white cell count had increased gradually in the beginning, with a spike about three hours ago, followed by a rapid drop to nearly zero. Frowning, he looked at the results for the other major blood components, all of which showed gradual changes during the first hours after the animal had been infected, then major spikes or drops three hours ago before falling off to near-zero. The only exception was the red blood cell count, which gradually tapered off to zero half an hour ago, when the test monitor reported an error because the flow of new blood for sampling had terminated.
“The needle must have come out,” Vlad murmured to himself as he tried to make sense of the readings. What he was seeing should be impossible: the monkey should have been dead long before the red cell count reached zero. There wouldn’t have been enough red cells left to transport oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body.
Oddly enough, aside from an initial fever about an hour after the monkey had been infected, its body temperature had remained nearly constant. Even now, it was half a degree above normal.
Then he saw the respiration and heart rate data, and sat back in his chair in shock: the monkey had stopped breathing about the same time as the spikes in its blood work three hours ago, and its pulse had declined along with the red cell count until that, too, had stopped about ten minutes ago.
“Yob’ tvoyu,” he cursed under his breath, snatching his smart phone from his belt. It should have sounded an alarm when any of the monkey’s vital signs had passed certain thresholds. Pressing the button to activate it, it gave him a brief “low battery” warning before automatically shutting off. He was so tired that he had made the simple mistake of forgetting to charge it.
Putting the phone away, he looked at the biopsy display as it came up on a second monitor window. It showed a mass of cells that looked nothing like what he was expecting to see. All had a spherical nucleus, but were of varying sizes and amorphous in shape, as if the cell membrane had no discernible boundary. There was a hazy look to the image, and Vlad’s shock grew as he bumped up the magnification to 1,000X and saw filaments, tendrils, joining the cells together.
“No,” he breathed. “This is not possible!” He had seen this before: it was the malleable tissue of a harvester, and these morphing cells gave the creatures their ability to change shape and color.
But there were several other cell types visible in the mass, cells he hadn’t seen before in the detailed autopsies and analyses that had been done on the captured harvesters. He could only guess at their functions until he had time to run further tests.
Shaking his head in wonder, he brought up the webcam showing the inside of the biosafety containment chamber to see what the monkey’s physical condition was.
The image was blank. The camera must have malfunctioned.
Muttering a stream of expletives in Russian, Vlad got up and headed for the mezzanine level and the sealed room with the biosafety containment chambers.
***
Renee had only gotten a few fitful hours of sleep after the team had left for Spitsbergen. She could normally drop off to sleep quickly and rarely dreamed, but sleep hadn’t come very easily this time. When it finally had, it was full of very intense, violent images that she couldn’t remember now. Thankfully.
“I’m going to die of coffee poisoning,” she muttered darkly as she took another swallow of the strong brew.
The command center was fully manned now. Renee, being the senior person, was in charge of the base in Naomi’s absence, and she sat at the circular console that overlooked the rest of the command center. She had received a call from Ferris on the plane’s satellite phone to let her know that they’d landed safely – more or less – after a huge fireworks show at the airport on Spit
sbergen, and that the team was heading up the mountain toward the vault.
After that, Ferris had dutifully called back periodically to report on what he was hearing from up the mountain slope, but he couldn’t see what was happening with all the smoke. Naomi and Jack both had satellite phones, but neither had tried to call, and Renee had orders not to call them unless it was an absolute emergency. Renee had wanted to pick up the phone half a dozen times, but knew they were probably a tad busy. The last thing they needed was the phone ringing while they were trying to kill a harvester.
“Dammit,” she grumped. She hated not knowing. She felt like her kids were out there and in terrible trouble, and it was tearing her up.
The world situation wasn’t looking any better. Not only had the Earth Defense Society received top billing for the most wanted organization in the world by everyone from local sheriffs to Interpol, but there was a growing amount of finger-pointing going on between various countries in the aftermath of the attacks on the genebanks. Russia and Norway were already waging a war of words over sending military forces to Spitsbergen, with both sides claiming the other was responsible for the sudden outage of the critical SvalSat communications facility there that had cut off communications to hundreds of thousands of people. Renee didn’t have to hack into anyone’s computers to know that both countries were mobilizing troops along their mutual border: it was all over the news.
Making things worse was that Norway was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, which had originally been founded to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While the Soviet Union and its puppet Warsaw Pact were long since gone, Russia still felt very threatened by NATO, and knew that the other NATO countries were bound by their treaty obligations to come to Norway’s aid if she were attacked. None of the other NATO countries had yet put any troops on alert, but the news had reported that the senior NATO command staff had been called in for an emergency meeting at Norway’s request. That had further angered the Russians, and the news services were claiming that there were unverified reports of more Russian troops on the way to Spitsbergen, along with Russian warships from the Northern Fleet getting ready to put to sea.
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