Some evidence exists to suggest that many of the Chtorran forms may be much more unstable than previously thought. One of the most curious and puzzling of all biological phenomena is that of the "exploded" millipede.
Periodically, a millipede will be discovered that seems to be bulging right out of its own exoskeleton. The shell segments are pushed apart, sometimes even discarded, and fatty protrusions have expanded aggressively outward. From one day to the next, these swellings will increase at a cancerous rate; the growth is almost visible to the naked eye. Sometimes the creature is able to survive for a while in this condition, but death usually occurs within a week or less. In some cases, the creature's exoskeleton gives way suddenly, and the creature simply "explodes"-not violently; the impact is less than that of a water balloon; but it is still noisy and forceful enough to startle unprepared observers.
It is possible that this condition is a Chtorran disease-some cancerous condition that affects only millipedes; perhaps it represents some failure of the millipede to adapt to Terran conditions. It is equally possible that it represents a failed attempt by the millipede to metamorphose into something else. In either case, the mechanism by which millipedes may be exploded is worthy of further investigation, as it may point to ways to disable not only this species, but other related ones.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 63
Authorization
"The mere fact that a story might be true should not discourage one from telling it."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Lizard was in the conference room. Alone. Sitting at the table and working her way through a stack of reports. She looked up when I entered.
I didn't say anything. I just crossed to the front of the room. I went to the podium and started putting pictures on the screens. The horror of Coari. Click. Click. Click. I filled the walls with them. Over and over and over again. Lizard watched me without emotion.
Only one screen remained blank. I put the last set of images on the empty screen behind me.
Japura. The corral. The little brown girl in the pink dress. Live.
I left the pictures flashing on the walls larger than life, then I went to the table and sat down across from her.
She studied my face. She looked at the pictures behind me, the horrors of Coari. She turned slowly and looked again at the pictures at the front of the room.
She put down the report in-her hands and cleared her throat. "All right," she said. "You've made your case."
"Thank you," I said.
"You didn't have to do this, you know. The pictures, I mean."
"Yes, I did. I didn't want you to have any doubts."
She lowered her eyes. Then raised them again. "I don't have any doubts," she said. "Not where you're concerned."
"I'm not going," I said conversationally. "Siegel says he doesn't need me."
She accepted the information without comment, only a nod. "But you already knew that, didn't you?"
She shook her head. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it, rethought her words, and tried again. "Yes, I have the authority to stop you from going down into the nest. No, I wouldn't use it. Because if I did, I'd lose you anyway. I'd lose your trust and your respect. I'd lose everything about you that I cherish and need the most. Your independence."
I realized abruptly that she was using her professional voice on me. And I didn't know if she was lying or not. It didn't matter. I wanted to believe her. That was enough.
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for your honesty." I couldn't think of anything else to say. I pushed my chair back and rose to my feet. "I, uh-"
"Yes?"
Oh hell. The words poured out of me. "I was wrong to think about going. I was thinking selfish. You need me. The baby needs me. Siegel is right."
"Yes," she said. "Lieutenant Siegel is a lot smarter than you give him credit for."
"When this is over," I said. "If you still want to go to Luna… I'll go with you."
She smiled quietly. Sadly. "We'll see what happens when this over."
I nodded and headed for the door.
"Jim?"
"Yes?"
"Would you please turn off these pictures before you go."
The appearance of a mandala encampment is misleading. The elaborate patterns of domes, corrals, and gardens are only the topmost level, a two-dimensional representation of the intricate three-dimensional nest that lies beneath.
Underneath the surface expression of the mandala lies a vast network of tunnels and chambers dug deep into the earth, sometimes for hundreds of meters down. The level of architectural expertise demonstrated throughout the entire complex is nothing less than astonishing. Were it not for the precedents set by terrestrial colony creatures (ants, bees, and termites), a strong case could be made that the superb design and planning of the mandala nests are conclusive evidence of the Chtorran intelligence that we have been seeking for so long.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 64
Decisions
"Opinions are like chili powder-best used in moderation."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Madness turned into mania.
It swept through the airship like a fever. Faces were flushed with excitement. We weren't just watching anymore. We were going to do something.
The children. Save the children. A rescue. We could make up for our failure with the missing flyer. We never found her or her aircraft. The jungle swallowed her up.
Or… something that lived in the jungle.
Rumors. Excitement. Frenzy. Purpose.
I understood the general better now. Her sudden emotional withdrawal. She had to let this happen. She didn't want to. But she knew. The alternative was worse. Too much anguish already. Too much hurt. How much before the whole thing snaps? It was all out of control. Everything. The momentum of events was pushing us relentlessly forward. The tidal wave of time. The seconds piled up in an avalanche of death.
The mission passed out of my hands. My mouth still moved. Opinions. Advice. But no authority. Trampled in the stampede. It was Siegel's job now. "Oh, are you still here?" Even Lizard sometimes-
I knew she didn't mean it. It still hurt. I went through the motions anyway. The monkeys swirled around me. Everybody's crazy. But knowing it doesn't change anything. Some of us showed it less than others. I moved from place to place. I spoke to faces. The world blurred and focused. I looked at pictures. I wrote my reports. I answered questions. I didn't ask. I went through the motions.
I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering how I'd gotten so old. Who am I, anyway? What do I put on my resume? Where do I go next? Everybody has a job, but me. Without a job, who am I? They took it away from me. So who am I now? Even Lizard sometimes doesn't know
Memories are always dead people. I'm the man who danced with worms. The herdwalker. The worm-lover. The renegade. The deserter. The loose cannon. The bearer of bad news. Alienated. Man without a flag. No colors on my sides. No stripes. No stars.
I orbited worlds, unable to land. My thoughts buzzed. Strange images tormented my waking moments. My sleep was dreamless and unrefreshing. Morning was a hallucinogenic after-daze. The pictures blurred and focused. The horror was a drug. I stumbled through the movements. They saw it in my face and hurried past me.
The Indian scout. Kicked upstairs. Forgotten. Fuck you very much. Too smart for his own good. The system survives. Deny the reality. Don't listen to him. The conversation in my head was an insanity that couldn't be switched off. All the reactions. All the nightmares. Bad pictures.
I just want to know who I am! What's my job here!
-and woke up in a strategy session, shaking my head. Captain Harbaugh. General Tirelli. Lieutenant Siegel. Sergeant Lopez. Dr. Shreiber, scowling unhappily. Dan Corrigan. Dwan Grodin. Clayton Johns. The rest of the SLAM team. Me. The conference room was filled with grim faces. Prepping for the mission.
"No, no, no—" Dr. S
hreiber was saying. "Not after Coari. It's not possible. I don't see how you can do it. How are you going to drop a team down unnoticed into the middle of a nest? And then how are you going to retrieve them and thirty children?"
Lopez was shouting in her face, every bit as angry. "It'll work. We drop a perimeter of spiders. Half the team defends, the other half loads the pods. We load 'em, we launch 'em, the flyers catch 'em and bring 'em back. Ten pods, two spares. We pop one every thirty seconds. We're in and out, six minutes max."
"And what are the worms going to do during all this?" Johns asked. "Stand around with their thumbs up their asses?"
"Interesting image," I remarked. "Worms don't have thumbs or asses. And they don't stand." They all ignored me.
"We do it at night. The pods light up in the sky. That'll give the flyers a target and distract the worms on the ground."
"The worms are most active at night," I noted. Again, nobody noticed. I laid my pen down on the table and looked to Lizard. She was following the argument, letting it run its course. I wondered how long this would continue before I lost my temper.
"The w-weak l-link is the d-drop," said Dwan. "Th-there's no w-way to g-guarantee th-that you'll g-get th-the whole t-team into th-the c-corral."
Siegel answered that one. "SLAM parasails. The inflatables give us hovering time and maneuverability. Each member of the drop-team takes one spider and one launch pod down with him. We have twelve volunteers, they're running continual simulations in VR, but they're ready to go now. The first ones down will spray an aerogel containment around the corral. That'll buy us the time we need to position the spiders. By the time the spiders are overrun, we'll be gone."
"You're too confident," said Shreiber.
"Do you have a better idea?"
"Don't go. The worms are twitchy."
"How do you know that?" Siegel asked. "When did you become the worm expert?" He looked to me for support, but I glanced away. His shot was well intended, but badly aimed.
"Don't take my word for it," Shreiber said. "They know we're here."
Dwan spoke up then. "Sh-she's r-right. M-mostly. Th-the p-probes we've d-dropped have m-measured a v-very high level of agitation in th-the n-nest. W-we m-measure th-the amount of in-movement p-per acre. C-compared't-to wh-what we m-measured I-last m-month, th-the g-gastropedes s-seem c-close to p-panic. W-we d-don't know if it's b-because of th-the imminent g-growth ph-phase or if it has anything't-to d-do with us or wh-what ha-happened at Coari. Or m-maybe th-they know th-that th-the B-bosch is close to th-the m-mandala. B-but th-the g-gastropedes are d-d-definitely agitated."
Siegel didn't like the news. He wanted to shrug it away, but he couldn't. He looked to me. I nodded. It's true. "Shit," he said. But to give him credit, he remained on purpose. "Okay, we'll find another way to get in. Maybe a distraction to pull the worms away. Some kind of display-? Maybe we can put the flyers in the sky on the opposite side of the nest?" Again he looked to me.
I saw it only because I was looking in that direction. Lizard wasn't paying attention. Flight Engineer Harry Sameshima-he of the Japanese garden-had slipped in almost unnoticed and was waiting quietly at Captain Harbaugh's elbow, a clipboard in his hand. Lieutenant Siegel was still waiting for my answer. I waggled my hand in an iffy gesture. Maybe. We just didn't know. "We'd have to test it. Put some flyers out tonight, make some lights in the sky, monitor the worm reactions, go in tomorrow night." Nobody else saw it, they were still focused on Siegel and Lopez and Shreiber and me. Lizard glanced to Captain Harbaugh. Captain Harbaugh glanced to Sameshima. Sameshima shook his head no, a barely perceptible movement. He laid his clipboard down in front of Captain Harbaugh, who glanced at it briefly, then slid it over in front of General Tirelli, who also glanced at it briefly. She spoke softly. "I don't think we have the time."
It brought the discussion to an instant halt. Everybody looked to her.
She looked uncomfortable. "It's a… a matter of ballast. Keeping a ship like this aloft is a constant juggling act of ballast versus helium. We're reaching the end of our operating range. We have to drop the rest of our monitors and pull out no later than noon tomorrow."
She was lying.
When the Bosch had been refitted, her operational range had been expanded to twenty-one days. She carried additional helium in her tanks to keep her aloft for a week beyond that. Something was wrong.
Dwan Grodin saw it too. Her face went momentarily blank while she searched her augmented memory; when she came back, her features worked in confusion. She didn't want to argue with her commanding officer, but she knew that there was a discrepancy between what General Tirelli had said and the operational parameters of the mission.
Some of the others sensed it too. Shreiber. "This is political, isn't it? We're being ordered out, aren't we?"
Lizard ignored her. "We'll be going out through Colombia. We can't go over the Andes. So we'll follow them northward, up through Venezuela, and from there back to Panama."
Again, that had to be a lie. I'd studied the same maps. Those mountains were a wall to an airship this size. We couldn't get high enough. There was no way we could get to the Pacific. What she was saying was that it wasn't safe for us to go back out through Brazil. Worse, there was something desperate about our situation.
"If we're going to go after those children," she added, "it has to be tonight."
"All right," said Siegel. "We'll go tonight. Let's try it this way-"
For half a second my fingers drummed on the table top. Then, without excusing myself, I pushed my chair back and stood.
Nobody noticed except Lizard. And Captain Harbaugh. And maybe Harry Sameshima. I exited quickly.
l stopped outside the door, waiting. Thinking. Putting one and one together.
The chill started in my groin, climbed up to my belly, froze the breath in my lungs, and came out as a gasp of, "Oh shit-how could we be so stupid!" I could hear my heart thudding in my chest like a kettle drum. I leaned against the wall with both hands and stared at my feet. I stretched upward and stared at the ceiling. I wanted to pound on the walls and scream-at myself, at the world, at all the people who'd planned this mission and missed the obvious. I held it in. I held it in as tightly as I could, waiting for-waiting for some sense of what was the right thing to do.
The door whooshed open behind me. I didn't look around. Someone put her hand on my shoulder. I looked up. Lizard. We studied each other without talking. She looked scared. I felt… detached. The fear still burned, but now it was burning in another person too. It wasn't all mine anymore.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"You had other things on your mind. More important things than this. I didn't want to distract you."
"I wish you had."
"I'm sorry," she said softly. "We knew they were going to try to sabotage the mission. We thought we'd neutralized them. We still don't know what they did. Jim-we need to keep this quiet. We don't want to panic anybody."
"It isn't sabotage," I said. "You're looking in the wrong place."
"Huh?" She didn't get it.
Fear raised my voice. "It's the stingflies!"
Lizard was skeptical. "Those stupid little bugs?" Skepticism became incredulity.
"The camouflage worked too well-" Once again, the adrenaline chill exploded. My voice got louder. "They think the Bosch is a worm! Go up to the skydeck. They're all over the skin! Stinging! Biting their way in! By now there must be a million pinhole leaks in the gasbags."
I thought that would have shredded the last of her composure. Instead, she caught her breath-"Oh, my God"-and slipped immediately into control mode. "Why didn't you tell me-?"
"I just realized it myself! If you'd told me about the helium loss sooner-" I stopped myself in mid-word. I held up both hands in a gesture of disarmament. "Never mind. This isn't about blame. We have a real problem here. We've got to tell Captain Harbaugh-"
"Tell Captain Harbaugh what?" The skipper of the airship came storming out of the conference
room, Sameshima behind her. The door remained open. White faces stared out. "What the hell is going on?" she demanded. "We can hear you all over the ship."
"Stingflies," Lizard said unhappily.
"What-?"
"Chtorran insects," I said. "They bite. They sting. They're mosquitoes the size of gnats. They've been biting their way into the skin of the airship. They think it's a giant worm. They want to lay their eggs. Or whatever it is they do. Once inside, they land on the gasbags. The red light filtering through the outer skin makes them react like they're still on the body of a worm. So they bite again. They keep biting until they find warm worm flesh. Only there isn't any. They're getting inside the gasbags, there's no oxygen, and they're dying there. But each one leaves a pinhole. That's how you're losing helium. Probably the tops of all the gasbags are shredded by now. You won't see anything, the holes are too small. But check the bottoms of the bags, you'll find dead flies. Pretty soon you won't be able to replace the gas fast enough. We're sinking."
Captain Harbaugh didn't want to believe me. Sameshima already did.
The nightmare was loose aboard the airship.
At the time of this writing, remote probes have extensively explored two mandala nests: the Colorado infestation that was destroyed by two nuclear devices, and the western Canadian infestation. The latter infestation was probed both before and after its destruction by assorted fire, freeze, and short-life radiation weapons.
Although it is probably too soon to say with absolute certainty, it is likely that the same patterns of construction observed in these two nests will also obtain in nests still to be explored; it is on that basis that this discussion is founded.
The dome-like structures that were originally identified as Chtorran nests are in fact only the surface entrances to the underground cities of the gastropedes. Wide, corridors circle downward from the entrances; there are always at least two per entrance. Later, as the surface nest is rebuilt to accommodate a larger subterranean nest beneath, there will be several main channels leading down into the body of the settlement.
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