Deep Storm

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. Besides, 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.

Crane took a seat, passed a weary hand over his eyes, then spread the readout across his desk. A welter of horizontal lines greeted him: the inner landscape of Mary Philips's brain, lines rising and falling with changes in amplitude and frequency. At first glance, all the lines seemed unremarkable, but Crane reminded himself it was always that way with electroencephalograms. They weren't like EKGs, where anomalies jumped out at you. It was more a question of relative values over time.

He turned his attention to the alpha rhythm. It displayed maximum amplitude in the posterior quadrants; this was normal for waking adults. He ran his eye along it for several sheets without seeing any abnormality beyond the kind of transients consistent with anxiety, perhaps hyperventilation. In fact, the woman's alpha PDR was quite well organized: very rhythmic, with no sign of admixed slower frequencies.

Next, he turned to the beta activity. It was present frontocentrally, in perhaps greater amounts than usual, but still within normal range. Neither set of waves displayed any particular amount of asymmetry or irregularity.

As he ran his eye across the sheets, following the thin black lines as they rose, then fell, a depressingly familiar sensation gathered within him: disappointment. This was proving, yet again, to be a dead end.

There was a knock on the door, and a lab technician appeared. She had a large stack of papers in her hand. "Dr. Crane?"

"Yes?"

"Here are the rest of the EEGs you requested." She stepped forward and put them on his desk.

Crane eyed the foot-high pile of printouts. "How many are there?"

"Fourteen." She smiled, nodded, and quickly left the office.

Fourteen. Great.Wearily, he turned back to Mary Philips's brain scan.

He moved down to the theta and delta waves, scanning from left to right, careful to interpret each ten-second digital epoch separately. The background activity seemed a little asymmetric, but that was more or less standard for the beginning of the test: the patient would no doubt settle down as the procedure continued…

Then he noticed it: a series of prefrontal spikes, small but definitely noticeable, among the theta waveforms.

He frowned. Theta activity, beyond a few random low-voltage waves, was extremely rare in adults.

He glanced through the rest of the readout. The spikes in the theta line did not go away: if anything, they increased. At first glance they were reminiscent of encephalopathy or perhaps Pick's disease, a form of cerebral atrophy that ultimately led to "flat affect" and dementia. The type of weakness Mary Philips had complained about was, in fact, an early symptom.

But Crane wasn't convinced. There was something about these spikes that troubled him.

Flipping back to the beginning of the printout, he turned the graph paper on its side. "Vertical reading"-examining the EEG from top to bottom rather than left to right-would allow him to concentrate on a particular brain wave and its distribution, rather than viewing the overall left-brain, right-brain picture. He turned the pages slowly, running his eye down the theta waveform.

Suddenly, he froze in place. "What the hell?" he said.

He dropped the printout on his desk and opened a nearby drawer, fishing for a ruler. Locating one, he quickly placed it against the paper, peering closely. As he did so, he felt a strange tingle start at the base of his neck and work its way down his spine.

Slowly, he sat back in his chair. "That's it," he murmured.

It seemed impossible-but the evidence lay right in front of him. The spikes in Mary Philips's theta waves were not the intermittent rise and fall of normal brain activity. They were not even random discharges of some physical pathology. The spikes were regular-precisely, inexplicably regular…

He pushed the Philips EEG aside and reached for the top readout from the stack the technician had brought him. It belonged to the man who had suffered the TIA, the ministroke. A quick examination confirmed it: the same theta spikes were present in his brain, as well.

It was the work of fifteen minutes to go through the rest of the EEGs. The patients had suffered from an incredible variety of symptoms: everything from sleeplessness to arrythmia to nausea to outright mania. And yet every one showed the same thing: spikes in their theta waveforms of a regularity and precision simply not found in nature.

He pushed the stack of printouts aside with a sense of unreality. At last he'd done it: he'd found the commonality. It was neurological. The theta waveforms of normal adults were supposed to be flatline. And even when they did spike, they were never supposed to fire in a precise, quantifiable rhythm. This was something utterly unknown to medical science.

He stood up and walked toward the internal phone, his thoughts piling up fast. He needed to consult with Bishop about this, and right away. With the autonomous nervous system affected, all these seemingly disparate symptoms suddenly snapped into place. He was a fool not to have seen it before. But how was it propagated? Neurological deficits on such a broad spectrum were absolutely unheard of…

Unless…

"Oh, Jesus," he breathed.

Quickly, almost frantically, he reached for a calculator. His gaze flew from the EEGs to the calculator as he furiously punched in numbers. Then he stopped abruptly, staring at the readout in disbelief.

"It couldn't be," he whispered.

The phone rang, shockingly loud in the quiet office. He jerked upright in his chair, then reached for it, heart racing. "Crane."

"Peter?" It was Asher's voice, sounding reedy and artificial in the oxygenated atmosphere of the hyperbaric chamber.

"Dr. Asher!" Crane said. "I've found the common vector! And, my God, it's something so-"

"Peter," Asher interrupted. "I need you to come here right now. Just drop everything and get down here."

"But-"

"We've done it."

Crane paused, mentally struggling with this abrupt shift. "Deciphered the message?"

"Not message. Messages. It's all on the laptop." Asher's voice not only sounded thin-it had an air of desperation to it as well. "I need you here, Peter. Immediately. Because it's imperative, absolutely imperative, that we don't-"

There was a crackle, and then the phone abruptly went dead.

"Hello?" Crane frowned at the phone. "Dr. Asher? Hello?"

Silence.

Still frowning, Crane hung up the phone. He glanced at the pile of reports on his desk. Then he turned and quickly exited the office.