“Other issue?” Crane asked.
“Marris thinks he’s figured out the method of transmission the saboteur is using to get information on and off the Facility.”
“Really? What is it?”
“No time to explain now. But once I’m out of the chamber he’s going to test his theory, try to trace the transmissions to their source. Meanwhile, I’ve e-mailed all the department heads—Ferguson, Conover, Bishop, the rest—to be on the lookout for anything suspicious.” He paused. “But that’s for later. Right now, our top priority is to decipher these signals.”
Crane sighed. “Very well. But the moment you emerge from the chamber, I expect you in Medical.”
At this, Asher gave a fleeting smile—the old smile Crane remembered from his first days aboard Deep Storm. “Thank you, Peter.” He turned to Marris. “Got everything?”
Marris hefted the laptop, nodded.
“We’ll be able to access the WAN wirelessly on the inside,” Asher said. “The sentinels are all several decks below us; there won’t be any interference here.”
“I’ll get the chamber prepped,” Crane said, turning away. Then he stopped. “Wait a minute. What’s this ‘we’?”
“I’m going inside with Dr. Asher,” Marris said.
Crane frowned. “That’s highly unusual. You’re not the one requiring therapy.”
“It’s the only way to continue our work without interruption,” Marris said.
Crane hesitated a moment longer. Then he shrugged. It’s only oxygen, after all. “Very well. Go ahead then, step into the chamber, please. I’ll walk you through the setup procedures via the onboard microphone.”
He stepped into the control room only to find that Asher had followed him. The chief scientist laid his right hand on Crane’s arm. “Peter,” he said, lowering his voice. “Don’t tell Spartan.”
“Don’t tell him what?”
“About the wrong turn we took. Or about how close we are now.”
This caught Crane by surprise. “I thought the whole point of this exercise was to tell Spartan what you find.”
Asher shook his head vigorously. “No, not right away. I don’t trust Spartan.” His voice fell even further. “And I trust Korolis even less.” His grip tightened on Crane’s arm. “Promise me, Peter?”
Crane hesitated. Hearing this—seeing the strange light in Asher’s eyes, the sheen of sweat on his brow—a new thought suddenly occurred to him. Vascular insufficiency might not be the only thing afflicting Asher. Perhaps what was striking the rest of the personnel was affecting him now, as well.
It was a profoundly depressing and disturbing thought.
Gently, he freed his arm from Asher’s grasp. “Very well.”
Asher nodded, smiled again. Then he turned away and walked toward the hyperbaric chamber. And as Crane ran through the control room setup—bringing the compressors online, ensuring the ASME storage tanks were topped up, checking the relief valves and pressure gauges—the haunted, hunted look in Asher’s eyes remained always before him.
33
Charles Vasselhoff shuffled slowly and uncertainly toward Bottom, the mess hall located on deck 3. It wasn’t so much that he was hungry—his mouth felt dry, as if moths had nested in it, and there was an unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach—it was simply that he had no place else to go. His large frame shook with chills, yet he felt so hot he’d had to unzip the top half of his orange jumpsuit. But what bothered him most was his head. The pain had begun like a normal headache, and he’d assumed it was just stress or maybe overwork. But then it had grown worse: a strange, irritating feeling of fullness, as if his brain had grown too big for his skull. His vision blurred, and his fingers grew tingly and numb at the tips. So he’d stopped work in the Electromechanical Machine Shop, where he’d been repairing impact damage to the alpha Doodlebug, and went to his quarters.
But that had been no better. He’d tossed and thrashed, soaking the pillow with a cold sweat and entangling his limbs in the sheets. Patroni, one of his bunkmates, had been there, big smelly feet up on the communal table, watching a cooking show on the Facility’s internal cable network. The incessant drone of the cooking pro became more and more annoying. The strange sensation in his head increased, causing his ears to ring. And then there was the way Patroni looked at him—sidelong, sneaky glances, the way you’d look at somebody who was talking to himself just a little too loudly. Vasselhoff had been aware of people staring at him for the last couple of days—it started, he thought, around the same time the headaches began—but never his own bunkmates. And so with a whispered curse, he swung his legs out of the bunk, pushed himself to his feet, and stepped out into the hallway, shutting the door behind him without a word.
And now he found his feet taking him in the direction of Bottom. At least, he thought it was the direction of Bottom, but somehow he found himself in front of a Radiography Lab instead. He blinked, swayed slightly on his feet, turned around. Somewhere he’d taken a false step: he’d try again. Putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, he started back down the narrow corridor.
A man in a white lat coat passed by, digital clipboard in hand. “Yo, Chucky,” he said without stopping.
Chucky took another two steps, then halted. Slowly, even stiffly, he turned in the direction of the technician, who was already halfway down the hall. The words had taken a second to register: the strange, crowded feeling in his head was causing his eyes to water slightly and the ringing in his ears to increase, and he was withdrawing into himself, preoccupied with the pain in his head and the chills that racked his body.
“Hey,” he said tentatively, his voice sounding thick and strange. He licked his lips again but was unable to bring any moisture to them. Turning back, he made his slow, plodding way to the cafeteria, stopping at each intersection and blinking at the direction signs, forcing himself through the fog of confusion to make the necessary turns.
Bottom was crowded before the impending shift change. Some people were clustered before an easel sporting the evening’s menu choices. Others had formed a line for the serving stations. Chucky joined this line, wondering—remotely—why his legs felt so wooden and heavy. The buzz of conversation in the small cafeteria seemed to make the ringing in his ears worse. It was so loud, so distinct, he was certain the others must hear it, too. Yet nobody seemed to find anything strange or out of place. It was as if invisible beams of noise were being directed into his head alone.
Where was it coming from? Who was doing this?
He took a tray from the stack, shuffled ahead, bumped into the person ahead of him, mumbled an apology, lurched backward.
It took all the concentration he could muster to move forward with the line. He reached for a can of soda, then another and another, thinking they might wash the dryness from his mouth. He took a plate of watercress salad, looked at it uncertainly, put it back. He stopped at the carving station, where a chef wielding a heavy steel knife cut a thick slab of prime rib for him, forking it onto a plate and drizzling a brownish line of gravy over it.
Holding his tray with both hands, he made for the nearest empty seat and sat down heavily, the soda cans rattling against each other. He had forgotten to pick up a knife and fork, but it really didn’t matter: the painful oppression in his head was spreading, causing his jaws to ache and his neck to feel stiff, and any trace of hunger he might have felt was now completely gone. Two women were sitting at the table, talking animatedly. They paused to glance at him. He remembered they were programmers in the research department but could not recall their names.
“Hello, Chucky,” one of them said.
“Tuesday,” Chucky replied. He tugged at one of the cans of soda, tugged again, and it opened, spraying a small jet of brown liquid over his hands. He raised it to his lips and took a long, greedy sip. It hurt just to fit his mouth to the can opening, and he did it imperfectly; soda dribbled down his chin as he swallowed. Even the swallowing hurt.
Damn it.
Suddenly, he felt afraid: afraid of the numbness in his fingers; afraid of the chills that racked his body; and, most of all, afraid of the whispering inside his head. His mouth went dry again and he took another sip, heart pounding. He could feel the warm liquid going down, but it had no taste.
The voices grew louder. And as they did, Chucky’s fear went away, replaced by a rising anger. It wasn’t fair. Why were they doing this to him? He hadn’t done anything. Beam signals into somebody else’s head; there were plenty of assholes on the Facility ripe for it.
The women at the table were looking at him, frowning with concern. “Are you okay, Chucky?” the other programmer asked.
“Fuck you,” Chucky said. They didn’t give a shit about him. They just sat there staring, letting the signals fill his head with voices, fill his head until it exploded…
He rose abruptly, knocking over his tray and spilling soda and meat juices over the table. He swayed dangerously, righted himself. The cafeteria was spinning and the voices in his head were louder still. But that was suddenly all right: he knew now where the beams were coming from. They were radioactive, they had to be; he’d been a fool not to have realized it before. He lurched toward the carving station, grabbed one of the heavy knives lying there, still speckled with bits of meat and shiny gobbets of fat. The chef said something and reached forward, but Chucky slashed with the knife and the man shrank back. There was a scattering of screams, but they were barely audible beneath the voices in his head and Chucky paid no attention. He staggered out of the cafeteria and into the hallway, brandishing the knife. It was the radiation, he knew that now: getting into his head, making him strange, making him sick.
He would put a stop to that.
He lurched as quickly as he could down the hall. There would be no wrong turns this time: he knew exactly where he needed to go, and it wasn’t far away. People he passed pressed themselves against the walls to avoid him, but they were now little more than fuzzy, monochromatic shapes and he paid them no heed.
As he half shuffled, half staggered down the corridor, the chills grew worse and the voices grew louder. He wouldn’t listen; no, he would not do the terrible things they urged on him. He would stop them; he knew just what to do.
There it was, just ahead now: a large, shielded hatchway, with a burgundy-and-yellow radiation sign above it and two marines standing guard. Catching sight of him, they both started yelling, but Chucky could hear nothing over the chorus of voices. One of the marines dropped to his knees, still mouthing frantically, pointing something at him.
Chucky took another step forward. Then there was a brilliant flash of light and a roar so loud it overwhelmed even the babel of voices; pain blossomed in Chucky’s chest; he felt himself driven backward with incredible violence; and then, slowly, the pain and the voices ebbed away into endless blackness and—at long last—he found peace.
34
The larger of the two operating bays in the Medical Suite had all the equipment and instrumentation necessary for major surgical procedures, from standard appendectomies to complex laparoscopic work. This evening, however, it had been appropriated for an entirely different function: that of temporary morgue.
The corpse of Charles Vasselhoff lay on the operating table, faintly bluish under the bright lights. The skullcap had been removed; the brain weighed, then returned. Now the metal walls of the bay rang with the sound of a Stryker saw as Crane attacked the breastbone, making the Y incision down the chest and across the abdomen. A female intern stood at his elbow, beside the tray of autopsy instruments. Just beyond was Michele Bishop. Her face was covered by a medical mask, but her brow was furrowed.
Near the door, and well back from the body, stood Commander Korolis. “When will the final report be ready, Dr. Crane?” he asked.
Crane ignored him. He turned off the vibrating saw, handed it to the waiting intern, then turned toward the microphone of a digital tape recorder and resumed dictation. “Penetrating gunshot wound to the right side of the chest. Injury to the skin and soft tissue. No perforation. There is no indication of close-range firing, such as powder residue or charring of the wound.” He glanced at Bishop, who wordlessly handed him a pair of rib cutters. He snipped the remaining ribs, then carefully lifted off the chest plate.
Using forceps, he studied the devastation revealed by the overhead light. “Wound path is front to back, slightly downward. The wound itself consists of a ten-sixteenth-inch circular hole, with circumferential abrasion and a slight marginal radial laceration. There are injuries to the anterior right second rib, lower lobe of right lung, right subclavian vein, and lower gastrointestinal tract.” He picked up an enterotome, inserted its bulb-shaped blade into the lumen, and gave it a gentle downward tug, pushing the viscera to one side. “Deformed large-caliber bullet embedded in tissue to the right side of the T2 vertebral body.” Gingerly, he fished out the bullet with the forceps, then turned back to the recorder.
“Pathological diagnosis,” he continued. “The entrance gunshot wound to the upper chest entered the right pleural cavity and lacerated the right subclavian vein. Cause of death: trauma and extensive bleeding into the right pleural space. Manner: homicide. Toxicology report to follow.”
Korolis raised his eyebrows. “Homicide, Dr. Crane?”
“What would you call it?” Crane snapped. “Self-defense?” He dropped the bullet into a metal basin, where it clattered back and forth.
“The man was brandishing a deadly weapon in an aggressive and threatening manner.”
Crane laughed bitterly. “I see. Those armed soldiers were in jeopardy.”
“Vasselhoff was intent on trespassing into a highly restricted and sensitive area.”
Crane handed the forceps to the intern. “What, he was going to carve up your precious reactor with a kitchen knife?”
Korolis’s eyes darted quickly to the intern and Dr. Bishop before returning to Crane. “It is made quite clear to everyone on sign-up: the strategic assets on this Facility will be protected at all costs. And you should be more careful what you say, Doctor. The consequences for breaching the agreements you signed are most severe.”
“So sue me.”
Korolis paused a moment, as if considering this. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, almost silky. “When can I expect that report?”
“When I finish it. Now why don’t you get out and let us get on with our work?”
Korolis paused again. Then a small smile—little more than a baring of teeth—formed on his lips. He glanced down at the corpse. And then, with a barely perceptible nod to Bishop, he turned and silently left the operating bay.
For a moment, the three stood motionless, listening to the departing footsteps. Then Bishop sighed. “I think you just made an enemy.”
“I don’t care,” Crane replied. And in fact he did not care. He felt almost physically sick with frustration—frustration over the climate of secrecy and military intolerance that hung over the entire Deep Storm project; frustration over his own inability to put an end to the affliction that had just, indirectly, caused the death of Vasselhoff. He pulled off his gloves, tossed them into the metal basin, and snapped off the recorder. Then he turned to the intern. “Would you mind closing up, please?”
The intern nodded. “Very well, Dr. Crane. Hagedorn needle?”
“That will be sufficient, yes.”
He stepped out of the operating bay and into the central corridor of the medical suite, where he slumped wearily against the wall. Bishop came up beside him.
“Are you going to finish the report?” she asked.
Crane shook his head. “No. If I think about it any more right now, I’ll just get too angry.”
“Maybe you should get some sleep.”
Crane gave a mirthless laugh. “Wouldn’t happen. Not after a day like today. Be
sides, I’ve got Asher to deal with. He’ll be coming out in about three hours.”
Bishop looked at him. “Out of what?”
“You didn’t know? He’s in the hyperbaric chamber.”
Bishop’s look turned to one of puzzlement. “Asher? Why?”
“His vascular insufficiency condition. It seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of days. He’s now presenting with ulcerations at the extremities.”
“Is there a blockage? He shouldn’t be in the chamber—he should be here, undergoing a bypass procedure.”
“I know. I told him that. But he was insistent. He’s…” Here Crane paused, remembering the code of silence to which he was bound. “He’s apparently very close to a breakthrough, point-blank refused to stop working. Even took Marris into the chamber to continue the work.”
Bishop didn’t respond. She looked away, gazing thoughtfully down the corridor.
Crane yawned. “Anyway, I couldn’t sleep if I tried. I’ll catch up on some paperwork.” He paused a moment. “Oh, yes—any of those EEGs come through yet?”
“One so far. Mary Philips, the woman who complained of numbness in the hands and face. I left it in your office. I’ll go check the status of the others—I had the technician put a schedule together, and at least half a dozen should be done by now. I’ll have her bring the printouts to you.”
“Thanks.” Crane watched her move briskly down the corridor. That was one blessing, at least: their relations had improved significantly.
He turned and walked slowly back to his cramped office. As promised, Bishop had left an EEG readout on his desk: a bulky packet of perhaps two dozen sheets of brain wave data, with a report clipped to the top sheet. He hated reading EEGs: the art of detecting electrical abnormalities in someone’s brain from the endless squiggly lines was a maddening one. Still, he’d been the one to request the tests; he couldn’t afford to leave any avenue unexplored. And if there was anything to his premise that the problems at Deep Storm were neurological, the EEGs could confirm or deny it.
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