by Greig Beck
He sniffed back a running nose. There was perspiration running down his sides and beginning to bead on his brow, thanks to his nerves. The dehumidifiers in his suit were having trouble regulating the temperature as it was freezing inside the tunnel and he felt frigid sweat on his skin as well as a cold bitterness in the pit of his stomach.
Both had their audio monitors working, but inside the tunnel there was nothing but an eerie stillness.
The pair climbed over more debris and finally stopped. The laboratory had been trashed, but now even the pristine walls simply ended. It was as if it had been converted into some sort of cave: dark and wet looking.
“There should be a little more of the lab infrastructure; it must have been totally destroyed somehow. But …” Anna moved in a little closer to him. “Not much more. This goes on further than our miners were supposed to have excavated.”
Stanislov turned slowly. The space was coal black and there was no sound or movement he could detect. But even though he knew that the labs should be right in front of him, their lights couldn’t pick out the end of the tunnel. Like Anna said, it was as if it continued beyond where their construction should have ended.
“Do we go in?” she asked.
“We’ve come this far.” Stanislov held up his arm with the wrist light. He panned it around. “Deep; maybe they did more tunnelling work and never reported it.” He stepped inside.
“This is not construction,” Anna said. “These walls, floor, and ceiling have been smoothed.”
“By what? Looks like a lava tube. Is this possible?”
“No,” she said. “There was volcanic activity on the moon, but that was nearly four billion years ago, just after it was formed. This looks recently melted.”
Stanislov bent to lift some papers, and then read, “Project Cyclops?” He lifted his light to the cold, dark tunnel, then to the small woman. “What is Project Cyclops? Tell me again what they were actually doing here.”
“I’m not authoriz—”
“Anna, I’m standing right in the middle of it,” he replied, but softly now. “I think I should know what it is I have got myself into.”
“Okay, okay.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We – they – were doing research into variant microscopic flora and fauna. Looking for stronger strains of some biological agents for vitalization,” she replied.
“Vitalization of biological agents? Germ warfare.” He snorted. “Then it wouldn’t surprise me if the Americans did destroy it. If I was them, I would. Did the commander know?”
She shook her head. “No, only Irina and myself. You were to secure the base and look for survivors. Irina and I were to recover any specimens. It was supposed to be simple.”
“Of course, don’t trust the dumb soldiers.” He shook his head.
She faced him. “It’s not that, just … everything was top secret. We were trying to develop new medicines and vaccines. But of course, the military was looking for … more aggressive strains. Everywhere on Earth eventually gets compromised. And after the cyber infiltration of the Black Sea laboratories, this became the safest and most secure place to conduct our experiments. The mine was real and still operational; it just served two masters now.”
He laughed. “So you were looking for the next strain of deadly flu, yes?”
“Deadly flus are for amateurs. We had progressed well beyond that.” Anna stopped and looked up at him. “We were investigating something that could turn battlefield combatants into compliant sleepwalkers. Imagine your enemy simply laying down their weapons, or walking docilely into your machinegun fire.”
“That would be good. You developed a chemical or a bug for this?” he asked.
“In a way. We were working with several strains of a fungi called cordyceps.” She shone her light around at the dark walls and then back at him. “Do you know what a zombie ant is?”
“I can guess.”
“I bet you can’t.” She sniffed wetly. “It’s caused by a strain of parasitic fungus that invades and takes over the ant’s body, and then controls it.”
Stanislov turned his light on her. “Where would you find such an abomination?”
“In nature, where some things are more brutal than you can imagine.”
He made a guttural sound in his throat. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.” She pulled his arm. “You go to a tropical country like Brazil, and venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly ten inches above the jungle ground and look underneath it. You will probably find an ant clinging to the leaf, jaws clamped tight. Not doing anything else but hanging there. But the thing is, this ant’s life is not its own anymore, as its body now belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis – the zombie-ant fungus.”
“That is horrible.” He blew air between his lips. “It grows on the ant?”
“Yes and no. It grows right throughout the insect’s body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course of a week, it orders the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend a nearby plant stem. Then it forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a leaf.”
“You were working with that here?” Stanislov felt disgusted. Fucking scientists.
“But then the true horrors start: the fungus pushes out polyps on long stalks usually through the ant’s head, growing into bulbous pods full of spores. And because the ant typically climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, when the polyp bulb explodes, the fungal spores rain down onto its fellow ants below, where the fungus inserts itself through the armour. And then it has more zombies to grow and expand itself.”
Stanislov cursed. “It is infected, and its sole role is to then infect more to become like it.”
“Yes.” She looked away.
“In this laboratory, this was their job? Your job?”
Anna nodded. “But I was part of the Earth team. I was just a bio-analyst who suggested experiments and looked at the results.”
“I’m glad it’s destroyed.” He shone his light around. “What did you – they – do to make this happen then?” He focused the glare of his light on her face.
“We had to move it up the evolutionary tree. Fast. So, we evolved a strain that could adapt to bigger and more complex host animals.” She looked away. “Mice first. And then larger mammals.”
Stanislov stared for a moment. “And then you went all the way … to people.”
She wouldn’t look at him.
“Tell me!” he yelled.
Anna turned back. “Yes.”
Stanislov shone his light over the chaos and debris. “And then your baby grew up.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” She made a small sound in her throat. “We simply allowed it to use humans as its host. And we selected the fungal growths that exhibited the best ability to adapt and learn.”
“And grow smarter. And now the base is destroyed, the laboratory is destroyed, and our team members are missing. I think your monster got very smart indeed.”
“It exceeded expectations.”
“I should kill you myself.” Stanislov shook his head. “Five more minutes then we get out of here. Captain Borgan needs to be informed.”
CHAPTER 36
Alex worked hard to quieten down the fury that raged inside him. It was his job to project calm when adversity struck – that’s what was expected of leaders. Even if right now his dark instincts urged him to strike out at something, anything. He drew in a deep breath and turned to face his team.
“Vincent is gone,” he said flatly.
“What the fuck?” Casey exclaimed. “The kid?”
“How – where is he?” Klara growled.
“He’s gone, there’s nothing left. He was taken right out of the lander.” Alex’s eyes narrowed as he stared straight ahead.
“They broke in?” Casey asked.
“No, I think he must have let them in. I think they wanted the craft. When they couldn’t stea
l it, they obliterated the comms system.”
“They cut us off,” Sam said evenly.
Alex nodded. “Yeah, I think the only reason they didn’t take the ship was because we have the launch key. So the ship’s link back to home is gone.”
“Where the fuck is it, this thing?” Casey’s voice was close to a roar. “We need to find it while it’s outside and obliterate it, now.”
Alex stepped in front of the female HAWC. “Is it the only one? Or part of many? And if we head out, what if there’s more in the base waiting for that to happen? When we have a target, we’ll take it head on. Trust me. But now is not that time.”
“Goddammit, Vin.” Casey bared her teeth, and punched the wall with her armored glove, leaving a dent. “Fuck it all.”
Alex lifted his chin. “This hurts, I know. But we’ve got to fight this thing with our heads as well as our weapons. Understood?” He looked into the face of each team member.
Casey had her head down, still muttering.
“Understood?” Alex’s roar exploded into the confined space.
“HUA!” the HAWCs responded as one. Even Casey Franks.
“Good.” Alex faced McCarthy. “What’s the state of the local comms?”
McCarthy scoffed. “Destroyed, like in the lander. Whoever did it didn’t just disable it but pulverized everything. The base doesn’t have all the parts to replace the system.”
“Can something be jerry rigged?” Sam asked.
McCarthy bobbed his head. “Maybe, but whether we can generate enough transmission power is anyone’s guess. Is the generator room okay?”
“If you mean still working, then yes,” Sam said. “But it doesn’t look like any generator room I know anymore. Looks more like when you forget that jar of grape jelly for a year or two and then open it – all mad stuff growing everywhere. Whatever this thing is, that might have been where it’s been hiding out – like a nest. Nothing living in there now, but we’ll need to keep watching it.”
“Let’s set up some external cameras and place some shock disks; I want this thing dead.” Alex faced McCarthy. “If the generator room is okay, is that what you need for now?”
“If it still works, we have a chance,” McCarthy replied. “But I’ll need to manufacture some componentry and have eyes in the back of my head when I’m doing it.”
Alex nodded. “The extra eyes we can provide. Get on the repairs, ASAP.”
“You got it,” McCarthy replied, about to turn away but stopped. “Hey, what is the status of our lander?”
“Operational.” Alex folded his arms. “My guess is they – it – still needs it. And undoubtedly still hope to get it.”
“Let ’em try,” Casey said between her teeth.
“Let who try?” Briggs asked as he and Mia joined them. His voice was flat. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t know who or what we’re dealing with.”
“Olga,” Mia replied. “That damn Russian woman.”
“Marion?” Alex lifted his chin.
“I haven’t finished with all Doctor Pandewahanna’s research notes yet, but she had completed some outstanding work in identifying particles of something that looked like unidentified fungoid fragments in samples from the Russian woman.” Marion folded her arms. “Her theory was it might exist in the bloodstream in a native state of the mimic.”
“Mimic.” Casey shook her head, then turned to look over the people in the control room. “And it might be one of them assholes out there, right now.”
“Stow it, Franks,” Alex said. “The thing was outside, and no one else came back in but me and Sam.”
“Yes, sir.” She nodded but didn’t look appeased.
“So it could be in you two now,” Briggs said. “See how the distrust can spread?”
Alex nodded. “Yeah, I do. What now?”
“There’s one fucked-up thing I don’t get, doc,” Casey said. “This thing is supposed to have eaten, absorbed, converted, or whatever it’s done, around forty people. Plus all those damned Russians. So how come it hasn’t grown to be so huge that it just can’t hide anymore?”
“I don’t know. This thing is unknown to us.” Marion tilted her head. “Well, sort of. Doctor Pandewahanna could identify some aspects of the fungal organism but not others. It’s a little like a cordyceps structure, but she wrote: ‘mutated’ and ‘altered’, and for now all we can go by is what we know about Earthly fungoids and the work Sharma has done.”
“Fungi are tiny things. Like mushrooms, right?” Klara asked. “How was this thing able to infect and take down Vin so quickly? He knew how to defend himself.”
“It must have tricked Vin into getting close to it. Like I said, it must be excellent at camouflage or a damned good mimic. It means it can copy things, copy people. Or become them.”
“Come on, I mean, looking like someone is one thing but that isn’t enough to fool people. It had to act like them. Really act like them. How is it that smart?” Klara frowned. “If it’s just a goddam fungus.”
“Well, for something with no identifiable brain, fungi are incredibly intelligent and capable of solving complex problems.”
“I’m not liking the sound of this,” Sam said.
“Tell us what we need to know,” Alex said. “Or at least what some of the characteristics of this creature might be. Anything that will help us understand what it is we’re up against.”
“And kill it,” Casey added.
“We just need some sort of souped-up anti-fungal, right?” Klara added.
“Sort of.” Marion nodded. “But first we need to understand that this thing is to Earthly fungus as we are to the first lobe-finned fish that walked out of a primordial swamp.” She stared down at the ground, her face tight with concentration as she seemed to gather her thoughts. “Earthly fungi have been known to problem solve. But the real Einstein of the fungal world are things called slime moulds.
“Slime moulds have existed on Earth for billions of years. We always thought of them as fungal bodies because they produced spores, but later we found that they’re something that is neither plant, nor animal, nor fungus. In fact, these critters are like something out of a horror novel – they are capable of learning, solving puzzles, and making decisions. And can fully regenerate after a dormant period so they don’t seem to age.”
“That’d come in handy if they were trapped on the moon for millions of years,” Sam said softly.
“And just lying in wait for us,” Casey added.
“I don’t know enough yet, but I’m not convinced this thing is indigenous,” Marion went on. She looked to Alex. “But it is using us. Not unlike the cordyceps genus.” She read through more notes, her brows knitted.
“Okay, so we believe this thing, or these things, are smart, but how smart?” McCarthy asked. “I mean, instinct smart, animal smart, human being intelligence level, or beyond even that? After all, if this thing is so smart, why hasn’t it tried to communicate?”
“Or is it so smart it doesn’t regard us as peers?” Sam asked. “Just food?”
“This is a nightmare,” McCarthy said.
“It is,” Marion agreed. “And it might not have started out as having process intelligence above simply acting on instinct. But then it grew through ingesting intelligence – being able to open locks, know what is critical to a human’s survival from an engineering perspective, or even how we communicate. That could be hijacked straight from the brains of the hosts it has absorbed.”
“It knows us by eating us. We’re both a food parcel and brain booster to this thing. We’re just sheep,” Casey said and made a guttural sound in the back of her throat. She turned to look over the people sitting in groups, some talking, some silent. “And it’s got all its sheep penned and ready for the taking.”
Sam turned to Alex. “And now it’s taken Vincent. Boss, you know what that means?”
“Yeah. Now it knows all about the HAWCs,” Alex replied.
“One more thing,” Marion said. �
�There is another name for the cordyceps fungus.” She laughed mirthlessly. “The puppet master.”
“Well, that damn fits,” Casey said.
Alex's jaws clenched for a moment and he turned to face Marion. “Finish the test. We need to isolate the source of the infection, and find out exactly who are the puppets, and who is the master.”
Marion nodded. “On it.”
CHAPTER 37
Launch Complex 39, John F Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida – launch warehousing center
Jack Hammerson looked at the images of the equipment hidden in the corner of the storage facility’s prelaunch area. Everything in there had supposedly been triple checked, weight balanced and size mapped. And everything in there goes on the craft, is absolutely necessary, no exceptions.
Hammerson’s jaws clenched. The ground crew never just “forgot” to load materials. Ever. Besides, the missing weight alone could throw off their flight calculations.
He had the flight load manager on speaker. “Well?” he asked.
“That material left behind is the majority of the medical supplies. It was crated and ready to go,” the load manager replied.
“But there’s no crate,” Hammerson replied. “So, the crate went, empty – is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s where it gets confusing, sir.” Hammerson heard the load manager sigh. “We do a final weight check when fully loaded. We expect there to be minuscule anomalies – the astronauts sometimes take personal effects and the like. We take that into account.”
“And?” Hammerson grew impatient. “Get to it.”
“There was no reduction in weight, but we did detect a slight increase,” he said. “It wasn’t much so we just wrote it off.”
“Ghost in the shell, huh?” Hammerson lowered his head for a moment, his mind working. “Someone emptied the crate, and the crate went. But there was additional weight – so something replaced the medical equipment.” He lifted his head. “What the hell went in that box?”
