Pandemic

Candice Walker stared at the tiny cone of hissing blue flame.

She couldn’t do it.

She had to do it.

Her chest trembled with the held-back sobs. No more… no more pain… please God no more…

Pain couldn’t stop her, not now. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to get out, had to make it to the surface.

She had to see Amy again.

Candice looked at her right arm, still not quite able to believe what was there, or, rather, what wasn’t there. No hand, no forearm… just a khaki, nylon mesh belt knotted tight around the ragged stump that ended a few inches below her elbow.

The knot’s pressure made the arm feel almost numb. Almost. The belt’s end stuck up like the rigor-stiff, stubby tongue of a dead animal, flopping each time she moved.

She again looked at the acetylene torch’s steady flame, a translucent, blue triangle filled with a beautiful light that promised pure agony.

I can’t let them get me again… do it, now, Candy… do it or die…

When the pain came, she couldn’t let herself scream; if she did, they’d find her.

Candice lowered the flame to her flesh.

The blue jewel flared and splashed, blackening the dangling scraps of skin and arm-meat, shriveling them away to cindered crisps of nothing. Her head tilted back, her eyes squeezed shut — her world shrank to a searing supernova point of suffering.

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d pulled the flame away.

Candice blinked madly, trying to come back to the now, trying to clear the tears. The bubbling stump continued to scream.

Do it so you can see your wife again…

Her mouth filled with blood — she’d bitten through her cheek. Candice looked at her shredded arm, gathered the last grains of strength that remained in her soul. She had to keep her eyes open, had to watch her arm or she’d bleed out right here.

See your job and do it, Lieutenant. DO IT!

Candice lifted her severed arm, opened her mouth and bit down hard on the belt’s flopping end. She tasted nylon and blood. She pulled the belt tight, then brought the blue jewel forward. Flame skittered, seemed to bounce away at strange, hard angles. The sound of sizzling meat rang in her ears, partnering with a hideous scent of seared pork that made her gag, twisted her stomach like a wrung-out towel.

This time, she didn’t look away. Blood boiled and popped. Skin bubbled and blackened. Bone charred. And the smell, oh Jesus that smell… she could taste the smoke.

She heard grunts. She heard a steady, low growl, the sound of an animal fighting to chew its foot free of the iron-toothed trap.

The torch slid from her hand, clattered against the metal deck. The blue jewel continued to breathe out its hateful hiss.

She pulled the scorched stump close to her chest. Her head rolled back in a silent cry — How much more? How much more do I have to take?

Candice forced herself to look at the charred mess that had once been connected to a hand. A hand that could draw and paint. A hand that had almost sent her to Arizona State to study art before she made the choice to serve her country. A hand that had touched her wife so many times.

Blisters swelled. Her flesh steamed like a freshly served steak, but the bleeding had stopped. Drops of red oozed up through the blackened stump’s many cracks and crisp edges.

Her right hand was gone… so why did her missing fingers still feel the fire?

With her remaining hand, she reached inside her uniform’s shirt, felt her belly where she’d hidden her drawings — still there.

Candice reached for the door that would take her out of the submarine’s tiny, steel-walled trash disposal unit. She couldn’t hide here forever. She held her breath, knowing that just lifting the TDU door’s lever would make noise, might bring her shipmates.

She closed her eyes again, searching for the strength to go on. Amy, I will never quit. They won’t get me they’re all out to get me they’re all trying to murder me…

Candice slowly lifted the lever.

The door opened to a dark passageway, empty save for the few wisps of smoke that filtered in from the fire she’d set in the engine room. The gray bulkheads, piping and electrical conduit looked no different than they had for all the months she’d served here.

Everything was the same; everything was different.

To her right, the wardroom where she had eaten countless meals.

To her left, the crew’s mess: pitch-black, all the lights smashed and broken.

Candice reached to the small of her back, drew her pistol. She’d shot two men dead; how many additional crew had she killed with her act of sabotage? She wished the answer was all of them.

She had to reach the dry deck shelter. The surface… she had to get to the surface.

Sweating, shivering and bleeding, Candice stepped out of the TDU.

She almost slipped when a cracking voice sounded over the intercom.

“This is the… the captain.”

Candice froze as if he was actually in the passageway with her, as if he could see her. It was his voice, familiar from so many months, yet not his at the same time. He fought to get the words out.

“Man Battle Stations Torpedo. I say again, man… man Battle Stations Torpedo. That… that is all.”

She flinched at the harsh click of the PA shutting off. Torpedo launch? Against who? There wasn’t an enemy out there, wasn’t anyone at all except for…

“No,” she said. “No.”

She’d disabled the sub’s ability to escape; she hadn’t disabled its ability to fight.

Escape. They were coming for her… she had to escape.

Candice held her severed arm close to her chest, her right shoulder shrugged up almost to her ear. She moved down the passageway, waiting for each step to bring one of her tormentors running.

If she could get to the forward escape trunk hatch that led to the dry deck shelter, if she could get into one of the SEIE suits, then she could make it to the surface. The dry deck shelter was amidships, just aft of the control room and attack center. To reach it, she would have to walk through the crew’s mess, past all the dead bodies.

And some of them, she knew, weren’t all the way dead.

Candice felt a vibration under her feet: the torpedo tubes flooding, the final step before launch. Only seconds until Mark 48 ADCAPs shot out at fifty-five knots, heading for ships that had no idea what was coming.

She walked into the darkness of the crew’s mess. An aisle ran down the center. Small, four-person booths lined either side. In those booths, she could make out lumpy shadows, the still forms of corpses, the crimson shade of dried blood.

This was where they had tried to bring her.

A dim light filtered in from up ahead, shone down from the open, overhead escape trunk hatch.

Her eyes adjusted enough to make out something on the ground just in front of her.

A severed head.

And she recognized it: Bobby Biltmore, an ensign from Kansas.

Congrats, Bobby — at least you’re actually dead.

She stepped over the head and kept moving through the aisle, waiting for one of the corpses to rise up and grab her, pull her under a table, do to her what they’d done to the others.

The smell of rot, fighting for dominance against the scent of her own cooked flesh.

Only a few more feet to go. The shadows seemed to move, to take shape and reach out for her. Her hand tightened on the pistol’s grip, squeezed hard enough to somehow force back the scream building in her chest and throat.

Candice Walker felt another vibration.

Fish in the water… torpedo launch. The targets wouldn’t just sit there, they would fire back. That meant the Los Angeles only had minutes to live.

She focused on the light ahead. A ladder led up to the escape trunk hatch. The ladder usually hung from brackets on an adjacent bulkhead — someone had connected it.

Candice reached the ladder and started up, her only hand holding the gun, using her elbow and smoldering stump to keep her balance as exhausted legs pushed her higher.

She climbed up into the cylindrical escape trunk: empty, thank God. At five feet in diameter, there wasn’t much space, but she didn’t care — salvation lay one more ladder up, one more hatch up into the dry deck shelter.

That hatch, too, was already open.

She stayed very still. She saw someone walk by the hatch. She saw a face, a flash of color. Wicked Charlie Petrovsky. He was wearing a bright-red SEIE suit: submarine escape immersion equipment.

Candice Walker’s pain didn’t vanish, but it took a backseat to the rage that engulfed her. Was Charlie like her? Or was he like them? Either way, it didn’t matter — she needed that suit.

The sub vibrated again. Another torpedo had just launched.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair! She’d done more than anyone could ask. She wanted to live.

Candice sniffed once, tightened her grip on the pistol, then quietly started up the ladder.

WICKED CHARLIE PETROVSKY

Wicked Charlie Petrovsky came to.

He lay on the floor of the dry deck shelter, bleeding from a bullet lodged in his neck. He kept his eyes closed, didn’t make any noise — he could hear her moving around nearby.

Candice Walker: the woman who had shot him.

Charlie was a guitar player. That was why he started calling himself “Wicked Charlie,” because he was wicked-awesome on the six-string. He’d known it was kind of douchey to give himself a nickname, but everyone liked him and he could flat-out shred on his vintage Kramer, so the moniker stuck.

None of that mattered anymore, though, because he knew he’d never play another note.

So cold. His eyes fluttered open to a view of Bennie Addison. Bennie’s eyes were also open, but they weren’t seeing anything because Bennie Addison had an exit wound above his left eye.

Charlie heard footsteps, heard the zwip-zwip sound of someone walking while wearing thick, synthetic fabric. She was somewhere behind him. The DDS was a squashed, metal tube some thirty-five feet long but only five feet wide — she’d have to step over him to reach the rounded door that led into the small decon chamber. The divers used it to clean themselves up after returning from a search, to make sure they didn’t bring any of the outside in.

The sound came closer, then feet stepped down in front of his face; right, then left, both encased in the SEIE suit’s bright red, watertight boots. He heard muffled crying coming from inside the sealed hood.

Charlie stayed very still. If he moved, she would shoot him again. Couldn’t risk that; he was on a mission from God. He couldn’t complete God’s work if he was dead.

He didn’t dare to look up, but he knew what she was doing — opening the door so she could step through, close it behind her, then flood the decon chamber. Once that chamber flooded, she could exit it and enter the water.

She was heading for the surface.

That was wrong. Charlie was supposed to be the one heading to the surface. God said so. God told him where to go, and what to do when he got there.

Wicked Charlie Petrovsky would not fail God.

Candice stepped into the decon chamber. The heavy door clanged shut behind her.

Charlie waited until he heard the door wheel spin, sealing the chamber tight.

He pushed himself up on his hip. He felt his own blood coursing down his shoulder. He pressed a hand hard against his neck. He didn’t have long to live, he knew that. That he’d survived at all was a miracle, the hand of God obvious and undeniable.

Charlie tried to stand. He could not. One hand on the cold deck, the other pressed against his bleeding neck, one foot pushing him along, Charlie crawled toward a life vest hanging from a bulkhead. He awkwardly reached it, slid first one arm through, then his head. His shivering, blood-covered hands fumbled with the straps.

Would God be mad at him?

The answer came immediately.

He heard a whump that shook the air a split second before the DDS’s starboard bulkhead ripped inward. A hammer blow of jagged metal tore into him, as did a simultaneous blast of high-pressure water that slammed him against the far wall, shattering bones on impact.

Not that Charlie felt it. He would never feel anything ever again.

The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned.

Its first infection vector had been rather simple in concept: spores that floated on the air, released by the Orbital from its position some forty miles above the earth. Those spores hijacked the host’s stem cells, reprogrammed them, turned them into microscopic factories. The factories punched out parts that self-assembled into triangles. Left unchecked, those triangles grew into hatchlings.

The shotgun approach of a high-altitude release meant that most spores were wasted. They blew into areas of low population, got stuck on the ground, or simply fell into wet areas where they crumbled into bits of nothing. When spores did land on a host, they worked well, but a hatchling couldn’t make more hatchlings. Nor could a hatchling spread the contagion by infecting additional human hosts.

So the Orbital had changed strategy.

It created a new design: the microscopic crawlers. Crawlers didn’t hatch out of a host. Instead, they migrated into the host’s brain, reshaped it, modified the host’s instincts and behaviors. A crawler-infected host could make new crawlers to infect other hosts. Unlike the hatchlings, crawlers could reproduce. They could spread.

The crawler method of contagion worked on a one-to-one basis, something a blond-haired little girl named Chelsea Jewel had once referred to as “smoochies.” Smoochies created the capacity for an ever-expanding army of infected, but the method was slow. It didn’t allow for continued, mass infections to occur.

It was Chelsea — not the Orbital — who solved that problem.

She created a third mode of transmission: turning her own mother into an obscenely bloated gas-filled bag containing millions of spores. At some point this swollen host would burst, scattering spores onto the wind like dandelion seeds carried by a summer breeze. The method was similar to the Orbital’s original infection strategy, but the swelling host was already on the ground — that meant better odds for a higher rate of transmission. Each spore could infect a host with triangles, or with crawlers, or it could turn that host into yet another gasbag that would burst and continue the cycle.

Before the Orbital was shot down, its logic processes determined it needed yet another mode of transmission, something that allowed for infection by touch alone, or — more important — by a vector that lingered in areas of high contact where multiple potential hosts could be exposed. As part of that strategy, the Orbital also wanted one additional key element: that this new vector could continue to infect long after the host died…

The swirling, churning, angry water spun Wicked Charlie like an insect dropped into a boiling pot, sucked him out of the submarine and into the cold, silent black.

His body seemed to hang for a moment, motionless, as if he were that same insect trapped in dark amber. Then, the life vest began to rise, bringing Charlie along with it.

His body floated toward the surface.

Charlie’s flame of life finally flickered out. His systems shut down, a cascading effect that should have ended all activity in his body.

Should have.

His stem cells had been hijacked to produce crawlers. These microorganisms had instinctively followed his nervous system, using it as a pathway to reach his brain. There they had collected, altered their shape and changed him.

A very specific type of his stem cells, however, had been reprogrammed to make something never seen before the infection that overwhelmed the Los Angeles.

That special type: hematopoietic stem cells, also known as HSCs.

HSCs have the ability to produce any type of blood cell. Charlie’s HSCs had been hacked to produce one specific creation, a modification of something common throughout the human body: neutrophils, more commonly called white blood cells.

White blood cells are a critical part of the immune system. They hunt down bacteria and other foreign matter, engulf and destroy the things that could hurt us. Neutrophils are amorphous, meaning they are without form. They move like amoebae: reaching out pseudopods, finding their path, then the rest of their shapeless bodies follow along.

When Charlie’s mutated neutrophils detected a severe lack of oxygen in his blood, the microorganisms reacted as they were programmed to react. They weren’t sentient, at least not by themselves, but the lack of oxygen told them that their host was dead — time to prepare to abandon ship.

The Orbital had watched humans respond to its infection iterations. It had measured humanity’s reactions, its processes and equipment, and it had prepared a new strategy to deal with both.

Charlie’s neutrophils secreted chemicals that would harden into cysts, cysts to help protect them from the decomposition chain reaction that would soon turn Charlie’s body to mush. Protect them for a little while, at least — hopefully long enough for a new host to come along.

That done, the neutrophils “turned off,” entering a static state beyond even hibernation. From that moment on, only specific physical cues would cause the microscopic organisms to reactivate, to shed their cysts and seek out a new host.

Those cues? Vibrations. Movement. Regular movement, the kind only exhibited by living beings. Until they detected such signals, the neutrophils would remain motionless, almost as dead as the tissue that surrounded them.

“Margo?”

Margaret Montoya reflexively closed the laptop. It shut with a sharp click. She felt instantly foolish; caught in the act, she’d reacted without thinking when simply closing the web browser window would have done the job.

Clarence Otto stood in the doorway of their home office. He glanced down at the laptop in front of her.

He frowned. “Torturing yourself again?”

“No,” she said. “It was just some research.”

His eyes narrowed. “Really?”

Margaret felt her face flush. She knew better than to try to lie to him, especially about that.

She glanced at the clock next to the computer — he’d left work a bit early.

His black suit still looked pristine on his tall, thick frame, as sharp as when he’d left that morning. To anyone else, he probably looked all buttoned up, the kind of man who didn’t have to get off a bar stool to leave the place with three new phone numbers. But Margaret had known him for six years — four of those as his wife — and she saw the telltale signs of a long day: the tie just a bit askew; lines at the corners of his eyes because when he got tired, he started to squint; the slight discoloration on the collar of his white shirt, because he always sweated a little even in air-conditioning; the slight, damp gleam on his forehead that made his black skin glow.

Clarence walked into the office to stand next to her. She stared at the closed laptop. He reached a hand down to her chin, gently tilted it up until their eyes met.

“We talked about this,” he said. “We’ve been to therapy.”

She snapped her chin away. “And that was a waste of time, just like I told you it would be.”

Margaret searched his eyes, searched for the love that used to be there. She didn’t find it. Truth was she hadn’t seen that for a long time, hadn’t felt his warmth. Its absence made her feel far colder than if she’d never known it at all. Now when he looked at her, it was with pity. Sometimes, even contempt.

He tapped the closed laptop. “This is what you do all day,” he said. “You read the comments of uneducated idiots who have no idea that they’re only alive because of what you did.” He looked her up and down. “And I see that you also followed the therapist’s advice about waking up, getting showered and dressed?”

She’d forgotten she was still wearing the same ratty blue sweatpants and long-sleeved University of Oregon T-shirt she’d slept in. She’d meant to shower, but that thought had slipped away sometime during the second or third blog post she’d read. Was she angry at Clarence for calling her out on that, or at herself for not doing something so utterly basic?

“What I wear is none of your business. And I have to do something with my time — It’s not like you’re ever around.”

He tapped a fingertip against his sternum. “I work. You know, that thing that keeps a roof over our heads?”

She laughed. Even as she did she heard how hateful and dismissive it sounded. He was supposed to be on her side, not riding her ass.

“You think your job keeps a roof over our heads, Clarence? Oh please. We never have to work another day in our lives. We saved the world, remember? Uncle Sam will give us a check anytime we ask, just to keep us quiet.”

Margaret stood, stared at his face. He was a full foot taller than she was. Once upon a time, she’d loved that — now it was just annoying to always have to look up.

“You don’t work because you have to,” she said. “You work because you’re so goddamn naive you actually think you still make a difference.”

He said nothing. She saw the veins pulsing in his temples. They popped out like that when he clenched his jaw. He clenched his jaw when he was trying to control his temper.

“I do make a difference,” he said softly. “And so did you, before you decided to hide from the world. Before you decided to quit life.”

He controlled his anger, as always; his discipline enraged her. The world threw hate at her day in, day out, yet off to work he went, leaving her to face everything alone. She felt a thick rage bubbling in her stomach and chest, a physical, tangible thing with a life of its own. She had to dial that back, or once again she would feel like a helpless participant who could only watch as someone else used her mouth to say awful things.

“Quit? Is that what you call it? Well, fuck you, Clarence.”

He nodded, a tired gesture that said, And there it is, right on cue.

The same argument as always, flaring up faster each time.

Margaret pointed her finger, her weapon of choice. She pointed it right in his face because he hated that, because if a man did that to him he’d probably hit that man but he couldn’t hit her, would never hit her. She shook the finger as she talked, almost daring him to lose control, a part of her hoping that for once, just for once, he’d show real emotion.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Margaret looked to her desk, to the framed pictures of the people she’d lost. A picture of Dew Phillips in a jacket and tie just like Clarence’s, although Dew’s looked like he’d been wearing it for days. Dew’s crescent of red hair looked similarly disheveled; he stared at the camera as if he was just waiting for an excuse to beat the shit out of the photographer.

Next to Dew’s frame, a picture of Margaret sitting at a table with the short, pale-skinned Amos Braun, warm smiles on both of their faces, arms around each other, half-empty glasses of beer in front of them. Five years on and the photo didn’t make her think of the good times: she could only see his expression of panic, the life fading from his eyes as his blood sprayed against the inside of a biohazard suit visor.

And the final picture: a framed cover of Sports Illustrated. A massive football player dressed in the maize-and-blue uniform of the University of Michigan, tackling a white-jerseyed player wearing a silver helmet with crimson dots. Dirt and grass streaked the Michigan player’s oversized arms. The block letters at the bottom of the cover read: “So good it’s SCARY: Perry Dawsey and the Wolverine D lead Michigan to the Rose Bowl.”

Perry. Tough, brave, tortured both physically and emotionally. Every night she dreamed of his last moments on Earth — those final few seconds before she’d killed him.

Those three men had died on her watch. So had Anthony Gitsham, Marcus Thompson, Officer Carmen Sanchez and a dozen other people she’d met, along with an entire city of people she had not.

“You can’t know what it’s like,” Margaret said.

He rolled his eyes. “You going to tell me again how you killed a million people? You didn’t kill them, Margaret.”

She felt the scream tear at her throat, felt her face screw into a nasty, lip-curling mask.

“I’m the one who told them to drop that bomb! I’m the one who made those people die! Me! But you wouldn’t know what that kind of responsibility is like because you’re just a goddamn grunt.”

This was the part of the dance where he’d say something like just a grunt? I’m not as smart as you, so I don’t matter? and then she would tell him he was exactly right, because that would hurt him and she wanted to hurt him. She didn’t have anyone else to lash out against.

His eyes narrowed to black slits. His skin gleamed brighter, because the arguments always made him sweat. He took in a nostril-flaring breath. There it was, the anger she wanted to see.

She waited for his usual response.

He didn’t deliver it.

The big, held breath slowly slid out of his lungs — not as a yell, but a sigh of defeat. And he didn’t even look angry anymore. He didn’t look hurt, either.

He looked… spent.

Clarence stared at the floor.

Margaret felt a pang of alarm; something was wrong, more wrong than normal — Clarence Otto always looked people in the eye, as if he was a lighthouse perpetually flashing confidence, forever broadcasting a constant message of Alpha male.

Margaret felt hot. Her left hand pulled at the leg of her sweatpants: tug and release, tug and release, tug and release.

“Margo,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Her hand speeded up: tug and release, tug and release, tug and release. He was going to say the words she constantly hoped he would say, the same words she never wanted to hear.

He cleared his throat, an oddly soft noise from a man of his size.

“Us,” he said, the single syllable loud, definitive. “I can’t do us anymore.”

She took a step back, a step so weak she almost fell. And still, he stared down.

This man, this tall, strong man who had served his country in one form or another for twenty years, this black man who had put up with anything he’d had to in order to climb the ranks of the white-run CIA, this lover who had once put her on the back of a motorcycle and raced her out of Detroit while the world went crazy around them — now this man could not look at her.

That tiny inaction said more than any words ever could. Clarence had already made up his mind. He had made the decision days ago, probably, and had been waiting for the right moment to tell her. Knowing him, he’d been waiting for a chance to be kind, to at least try to be kind, but she’d forced it out of him. She’d been a self-involved bitch and backed him into a corner.

“Honey…” she said. There was more to the sentence, but she lost it. The single word hung in the air, lonely and impotent.

She thought of their early years together, their happiest years, and how they’d squandered much of that with days and even weeks apart due to her marathon sessions in the lab or his other assignments. She thought of how they’d console each other by saying they had all the time in the world to catch up, because they were married, because they were together.

Now it was all gone.

Clarence sniffed. He blinked back tears. “I’m getting older, Margo. I want a wife who’s here. I want a family.”

“I can’t,” she said instantly, feeling better for the briefest moment because this was another familiar argument. “I can’t bring a child into this world.”

A world of death and violence. A world of constant hatred. And she was too old, too old for a baby… those excuses and a hundred more.

Clarence sniffed again. He wiped the back of his hand against his eyes. “I know you can’t,” he said. “I accept that. Once I was willing to give up children if I could have you” — he looked up, spread his hands to indicate the room where she spent almost all her time — “but you’re not you anymore, Margo.”

She shook her head. “Honey, you don’t—”

“Stop,” he said sharply, the word a slap that landed in her soul instead of on her face. Then, softer: “You know me. You know I wouldn’t start this unless it was already finished. I love you. I always will. You didn’t kill millions, you saved billions. I tried to help you realize that. But you know what? It’s just not something you want to hear.”

Margaret spent much of her time hating him, wanting him to go, but now that he’d brought the idea out of the shadows and into a squirming reality, she suddenly, desperately wanted him to stay. She couldn’t have let this slip away.

“I won’t give you babies, so you’re leaving me,” she said. “That’s all I am to you? Just a breeding factory?”

She’d used that argument before, and it had always worked. This time, however, his eyes hardened.

“You’re not a breeding factory,” he said. “You’re not a wife, either. We don’t even make love.”

This was about his goddamn dick? Her hands clenched into fists. “We just had sex a couple of days ago.”

“Two weeks ago,” he said. “Only the second time in the last four months.”

It seemed like more, but she knew better than to argue with him. He probably kept a calendar somewhere, tracked the actual days. That was often the difference between the two of them: Margaret reacted, Clarence planned.

He weakly waved a hand at the laptop. “You don’t want me because that is your lover. You want the hurt and the misery. You want to read the awful things people say about you.”

She felt a stinging in the back of her eyes, and a hard piece of iron in her chest where it met her neck. “They despise me,” she said. “I deserve it.”

The sadness faded from his eyes, replaced by conviction. That look stabbed deeper than his angry stare ever could — it was done.

“You don’t deserve to be hated,” he said. “But I’m done being your punching bag. If you can’t love yourself, I won’t spend any more time trying to convince you why you should. You’ve given up on life. I haven’t. I need someone who’ll fight by my side, not roll over and wait for death. I need a soldier. That’s what you were, once… but not anymore.”

She felt her hands gripping her shoulders, felt her body start to shake. Her rage had vanished. The puppeteer that made her say horrible things had fled the field of battle.

“But Clarence… I love you.”

He shook his head.

Margaret wanted to go to him, hold him, have him hold her, but a barrier had sprung up between them, a distance that might as well have been miles.

His cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out in an automatic motion, so fluid and fast it was more muscle memory than conscious thought.

“Don’t answer that,” she said. “Please… not now.”

He looked at the screen, then at her. “It’s Longworth.”

“I don’t care if it’s Jesus. Not now, Clarence, please.”

He stared at her for another moment. The phone buzzed again. He answered.

“Yes sir?”

Clarence listened. His eyes widened. “Yes sir. Now is fine.”

He put the phone away.

She felt numb. Not cold, not hot, not even angry or sad — just numb. “You just told me you’re abandoning me, and now you’re going to go to work?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Murray will be here in fifteen minutes.”

The director of the Department of Special Threats was coming to their house. At three-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. It was important, but she didn’t care.

“You know I don’t want anyone here,” she said. “Why didn’t he have you drive in?”

Clarence took a step closer. “Because he’s coming to see you.”

She felt a cold pinch of fear. There could be only one reason Murray wanted to see her:

It was starting again.

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Such a tough choice: sit in the sun and watch girls in bikinis, or spend the afternoon rolling up forks and knives in napkins? Steve Stanton had opted for the former.

He’d slipped away from the restaurant earlier that morning while his mother, father, uncle and cousins were prepping the day’s vegetables, pot stickers and egg rolls. Steve held advanced degrees in robotics, artificial intelligence and computational science, yet his family wanted him to snap the stems off green beans and prepare a hundred sets of flatware for the customers who couldn’t figure out how to use chopsticks? He wasn’t doing it, especially on a day like today.

Instead, Steve had brought a lawn chair out to the narrow, run-down park that ran along the St. Joseph’s River. He’d also brought his laptop. That, connected through his cell, gave him the Internet. His father didn’t know cell phones could do that: if the man came looking for Steve, he’d start in the coffee shops that offered free Wi-Fi.

Steve gazed up at blue skies, soaking up delicious warmth. For once, the November clouds had failed to appear. Gulls called constantly, both close and distant. He looked at the boats either heading out onto the endless horizon of Lake Michigan, or returning to port. A century-old, black-iron bridge hovered over the river, ready to turn ninety degrees and connect the railroad tracks on either side should a train come along.

His father would never look for him here, not in the park while an unseasonal sun blazed down. Steve normally avoided the sun. He’d inherited his mother’s light complexion. As she had done back in China, she made a point of staying as pale as possible; dark skin was for laborers, for fieldworkers. Steve didn’t care about his color. He stayed covered up because he had no intention of dying from skin cancer. Shorts and a T-shirt might have been more comfortable than his sweatshirt and jeans, but the long sleeves and hood blocked the sun’s rays.

Butt in the lawn chair, laptop on his knees, Steve slid his sleeves a little higher so he could type unencumbered. Not that he was typing all that much; three girls were also taking advantage of what might be the year’s last sunny day to stretch themselves out on a blanket laid upon the grass. They all looked to be in their midtwenties, about Steve’s age. His eyes kept flicking away from his screen’s engineering reports and oceanographic research to the girls, to their long hair, to their tan skin gleaming with oil.

He ached to talk to them. But those kinds of girls didn’t want a guy like him. Girls like that wanted the captain of the football team, not the captain of the chess club. Girls like that didn’t care that he’d earned two doctorates before he’d turned twenty-one, could have earned at least another three if he hadn’t been forced to keep his discoveries secret.

And anyway, those kind of girls didn’t go for first-generation Chinese American nerds. As smart as he was, talking to women made him feel stupid. It made him feel small.

The girls back at Berkeley had liked him. Well, not girls who looked like that, but at least they were girls. Here in Benton Harbor, Michigan? Women wouldn’t give him the time of day, let alone their phone numbers.

For all Steve’s brilliance, he was wasting away in this shit hole of a town in a shit hole of a state, waiting for a moment to serve his people and his country — a moment that was never going to come. He couldn’t use his education, his rather significant set of skills, couldn’t do anything that might draw attention. Not until the Ministry of State Security decided there was nothing in Lake Michigan worth finding.

His eyes followed the curve of the middle girl’s ass, took in the smooth skin, the way the sun kicked off a soft reflection from the curve’s apex.

She looked up, caught him staring. He turned away instantly, tapped random keys on his keyboard, focusing on the screen like it was the only thing in the world. He heard the girl laugh. Just her, at first, then the other two.

He felt smaller than ever.

A trickle of sweat rolled down his temple, but he knew the heat wouldn’t last. Weather.com said the first big fall storm was on the way in. Early effects were due in about a half an hour. The encroaching front would soon chase away the girls with the long legs and tight butts, while Steve would be nice and warm in his heavier clothes. By tonight, everything would be freezing and wet.

Why did people live in Michigan, anyway? Winters full of cold and snow. Trees shed leaves that turned into a brown paste on the roads. When the summer finally came, it brought with it sweltering, cloying humidity that seemed to suck the sweat right out of your body.

He wanted out of this washed-up excuse of a small city, wanted to leave this frigid state for good, to go somewhere the sun never hid behind clouds or vanished for weeks on end. He wanted to go back to Cali, to Berkeley. He had friends there, people who understood him. And if he couldn’t go back to California, he wanted to go to his real home.

He wanted to see China for the first time, experience the nation of his people, see where his parents and ancestors had come from. Even his last name — Stanton — that wasn’t his. The MSS had ordered his parents to change their names when they arrived in America. More for his sake than theirs, as it helped establish their son as just another American boy.

What Steve wanted never seemed to matter, though. The MSS wouldn’t let him go to China. Not that he ever talked to anyone who was actually from the MSS — just their messengers, their errand boys.

So warm. Steve’s eyelids drooped. Maybe the girls stopped laughing at him, maybe he just dozed off.

A shadow fell across his face.

Steve looked up to see a wrinkled old man looking down at him. Well, if it wasn’t the MMS’s main messenger.

“Bo Pan,” Steve said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Bo Pan nodded once.

Steve sighed. “You’re blocking my sun.”

Bo Pan looked down, realized he was casting a shadow. He quickly stepped to the left.

“Sorry, sorry,” the man said.

Bo Pan wore secondhand jeans, secondhand sneakers and a Detroit Lions sweatshirt that was probably third-hand, if not fourth. With wispy hair around the temples of a bald head, and eyes that were deeply slanted even by Chinese standards, Bo Pan didn’t look like a threat to anything but the grass on some rich white dude’s lawn.

Steve sat up, turned, put his feet on the sparse, cool grass and packed dirt. “There’s nothing new to report. But you know that. Here to check up on me?”

Bo Pan shook his head. He looked out at the river, squinted at the sun, then took in Steve’s chair.

The old man frowned. “You look comfortable. Are you enjoying yourself?”

Steve smiled. “I am, actually. It’s a beautiful day for a pimp like me.”

Bo Pan’s mouth pursed in confusion. For someone who had spent decades living in America, he understood little of the culture and none of the lingo.

“Do your mother and father know it’s a beautiful day? I saw them working away in the restaurant.”

Bo Pan hadn’t come around in, what… three months? Three months without a peep, and the first thing he had to communicate was a guilt trip?

Steve eased back in his chair. He took his time, milking the motion just to annoy Bo Pan.

“My mother and father don’t need me today.”

“You are lazy,” Bo Pan said. “You have grown up like them.”

Like them: like an American.

Steve glanced over at the girls. He couldn’t help it. As if being a semi-heliophobic nerd sitting with a laptop wasn’t enough of a turnoff, now he was hanging out with a hunched-over, fiftysomething old man.

The girls were pulling on sweatshirts of their own, stepping into form-fitting jeans. The temperature was dropping.

“I’m not lazy,” Steve said to Bo Pan. “I’m efficient — my work is done, remember?”

The old man shook his head. “No longer. We have a search location.”

Steve sat up. He forgot about the girls, forgot about the sun.

“A location?”

The older man smiled, showing the space where his front right incisor once resided.

A location. Five years of effort, millions of dollars spent — Steve didn’t know exactly how much, but it was a lot — the whole reason his family and the People’s Party had hidden him away in this inflamed hemorrhoid of a town, and now it was finally his moment to shine. He didn’t know what to think, how to feel. Afraid? Excited? After all this time, was it finally his turn?

“A location,” Steve repeated. “How did we get it?”

Bo Pan shrugged. “The American love of money knows no bounds.”

“No, I mean how did we, or they — or whatever — get the location? Satellite? Did someone properly model the entry angle? Did someone find…” His voice trailed off.

Did he dare to hope?

Gutierrez’s green men. The story of the century. Steve’s task: build a machine that could dive, undetected, to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Could there be actual pieces of an alien spacecraft?

“Wreckage,” he said. “Did someone find wreckage?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “You don’t need that information.”

Steve nodded automatically, acquiescing to Bo Pan as if the man was something more than a simple go-between.

Wreckage. It had to be. Steve had finished work on the Platypus three months earlier. His baby was more a piece of art than a cutting-edge unmanned underwater vehicle. It sat in a crate like a caged animal, unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose. Other than midnight test runs, there had been no point in putting the UUV to work. Unless Steve knew where to look, he couldn’t have the machine go out and explore 22,400 square miles of Lake Michigan.

But now, they had a location.

The old man cleared his throat, dug his left pointer finger into the folds of flesh below his left eye, rubbed there. “When I last spoke with you, you said you had researched a local vessel that could take your machine far out on the water?”

Steve nodded. “JBS Salvage.”

“A small operation, as I asked? Not a big fleet of ships?”

“Just two men,” Steve said. “Only one boat.”

“Good. And you check on them frequently?”

“Every week.” A lie; a lie fueled by a stab of fear that maybe JBS had finally landed a job, that they wouldn’t be available. It had been three weeks since he’d even bothered to see if their boat was still in port.

Bo Pan cleared his throat again. This time, he spit phlegm onto the dirt. “Can you talk to them right now?”

“Of course,” Steve said, that feeling of foolishness growing. Why hadn’t he checked every week? Bo Pan was right — Steve had been lazy. If they had to find another company to carry the Platypus to the target area, how long would that take? Days? Weeks?

Bo Pan’s eyes narrowed. “You seem unsure.”

“It’s fine,” Steve said. “I got this.”

“And your strange machine… it is ready? There is nothing you need to tell me?”

Steve smiled: that was something he didn’t have to lie about.

“My gear is ready to rock, playa.”

Bo Pan nodded. “Good, good. They will be happy to hear that. If you hire the boat company today, how soon do you think we can leave?”

Steve felt a small burning in his chest. “We?”

Bo Pan looked away, embarrassed. “They want me to go with you.”

Of course. There had to be something to diminish the moment. Steve would be stuck on a boat with this old man for days, maybe even weeks. Well, that was a small price to pay to finally put the Platypus to work.

And, at the very least, it was better than rolling up forks and knives in napkins.

“I’ll go see JBS right now,” Steve said. “Maybe we can leave in a day or two.”

Bo Pan slid both of his hands into his sweatshirt’s front pocket. He pulled out a thick envelope and a cell phone.

He handed the envelope over. “Tonight,” he said. “Make them leave tonight.”

Steve took the envelope. It felt solid, heavy, a brick of money.

Bo Pan then handed Steve the cell.

“Call me when you know,” Bo Pan said. “Use this phone only. I am already prepared for the trip.”

The old man turned and walked across the park grass, headed for his rust-spotted, ten-year-old Chevy pickup.

Steve turned back to face the water. The girls were gone. The wind was already growing from a stiff breeze into shirt-pulling gusts. November was supposed to be the worst time to be out on Lake Michigan.

Five years preparing for this day. No, more like nine considering that they’d recognized his intelligence early and sent him to Berkeley, readying him for a project that would require a brilliant, deeply embedded engineer. Embedded? That wasn’t even the right word. Steve had been born right here, in Benton Harbor. He was as American as those girls, and yet he longed to serve a country he had never seen.

A lifetime of waiting for a chance to serve his people, his heritage, and now — perhaps — his moment had finally come.

He just hoped no one would get hurt.

DUTY

Sitting on the couch in her living room, Margaret felt newly aware of how much she had fallen apart.

Clarence sat on her left, as he if were really still by her side. That made him a liar. She wanted to hate him. He’d tightened the tie, dabbed the forehead, and once again looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of Government Agent Quarterly.

In a chair across from them sat Murray Longworth, director of the Department of Special Threats. Or, as people in the know tended to call it, the second-most-powerful agency you’ve never heard of.

A black cane lay across Murray’s lap, the handle atop it a twisted, brass double helix shape of DNA. Murray Longworth hadn’t aged well. He looked frail, as if somehow he’d bathed in Detroit’s nuclear glow and was slowly melting like a candle left sitting on a heater. His dark-gray suit was a little too big; Margaret guessed it had been tailored for him several years ago, several pounds ago.

A thick man in a black suit — a suit so indiscernible from Clarence’s the two men might as well have been wearing matching uniforms — stood behind Murray’s chair. A flesh-colored coil ran from a tiny, hidden earpiece to somewhere behind his neck. The man stared straight ahead, seeing everything and looking at nothing.

Three men in suits. She hadn’t bothered changing. Her sweatpants had two small holes in the left knee and an avocado stain on the right thigh. She hadn’t showered in three days. Margaret wondered if she smelled.

Murray forced a smile, his old, wrinkled face cracking like a windshield hit by a brick.

“Hello, Margaret,” he said. “You look like a bag of assholes.”

The man’s penchant for pleasantries hadn’t changed.

“And you look like an ad for a convalescent home,” Margaret said. “Isn’t there a mandatory retirement age in government work?”

Another smile, this one genuine. “I wish I could retire. My wrinkled old ass should be in a fishing boat in Florida, catching redfish and croakers.” The smile faded. “Not everybody gets that choice.”

Margaret felt a wave of guilt. Murray Longworth was over seventy, possibly even seventy-five. He worked ridiculous hours for a department that barely existed on paper, a department tasked with anticipating and defeating the country’s next biological nightmare. He was right: he should be retired, and yet he served every day while she sat on her behind and hid from the world.

She crossed her left leg over her right, a move that would have looked professional had she been wearing a dress.

“Murray, what do you want?”

He pulled a page-sized, brown envelope from inside his jacket.

“Nothing I’m about to tell you leaves this room,” he said. “Yesterday, there was an incident involving the Los Angeles, a nuclear attack submarine that was part of Operation Wolf Head.”

Operation Wolf Head. The task force assigned the duty of finding and recovering any wreckage from the alien construct that had crashed into Lake Michigan five years earlier. That construct had come to be known as “the Orbital” because, when discovered, it had been in a low, geostationary orbit that defied the accepted laws of physics.

Margaret had known about the task force, as did most of the public. The government couldn’t hide the fact that they’d moved warships onto the Great Lakes. But she hadn’t known a nuclear sub was involved.

Neither, apparently, had Clarence.

“I thought the Los Angeles had been scrapped,” he said. “And how could you get it through the Saint Lawrence Seaway without being seen?” He sounded annoyed, maybe even a little humiliated at being left out of the big-boy loop: Mister Super-Agent wasn’t privy to all the secrets, it seemed, and that fact burned.

Murray tapped the edge of the envelope against his cane. “We converted her into a search vehicle assigned with scouring the bottom. Slipped her through the Saint Lawrence with a fake superstructure that hid the sail and outline. Looked like just another tanker. What matters is that for five years, the crew of the Los Angeles found nothing of note. Six days ago the sub’s commander reported a significant discovery. Two days ago, the flotilla lost contact with the sub. Last night, the Los Angeles fired torpedoes at — and sank — the guided missile destroyer Forrest Sherman and the Coast Guard cutter Stratton.”

Clarence sat forward. “Sank? Heavy casualties?”

Murray nodded. “Two hundred and forty-four crew from the Sherman are dead. Fifty-seven from the Stratton. Seven more from the Truxtun, another destroyer, which was hit but remains afloat. We’re assuming the entire crew of the Los Angeles perished — that’s another hundred and twenty. In total, four hundred and twenty-eight dead or lost and presumed dead. Considering the number of wounded, we’re still adding to the list.”

Clarence sagged back into the couch.

Margaret suddenly wanted to go back upstairs and sit down at her computer. She could look at the blogs and read the comments, see if people were still talking about her — anything was better than hearing this.

Murray kept tapping the envelope against his cane, a rat-tat-tat beat that paced his words. “A third destroyer, the Pinckney, took out the Los Angeles. The Truxtun remains afloat, although it can’t do much. Right now the survivors of the sunken ships are all on board the Pinckney and on the Carl Brashear, a naval cargo ship converted for Orbital-related research.”

Clarence’s face wrinkled in indignation. “You didn’t evac the wounded to mainland hospitals? That’s not—”

Margaret’s left hand found Clarence’s knee. An automatic gesture, a way for her to tell her man relax, even though he apparently wasn’t her man anymore.

“The wounded can’t leave,” she told him. “No one there can.”

Clarence blinked, then he got it. Any of those survivors — wounded or not — could be infected. He turned back to Murray.

“The media,” Clarence said. “What’s the cover story? How do you explain the battle?”

“We don’t,” Murray said. “The flotilla was in the upper middle part of Lake Michigan. The shore was twenty-five miles away to both the east and west, a hundred to the north and two hundred to the south. Nobody on land saw a thing. The battle occurred in a no-fly zone, so there was zero civilian air traffic. The sailors themselves won’t be leaking the story, because right now no one leaves the task force — for the rather obvious reason that somehow escaped you.”

Hundreds dead, just like that. A U.S. ship sinking other U.S. ships; Margaret knew the infection could make that happen, could take over a host’s brain and make him do horrible things.

“Cellulose tests,” she said. “Any positives?”

She had to ask, even though she didn’t want to know the answer. Inside a host’s body, the infection built organic scaffolding and structures from cellulose, a substance produced by plants that was not found in the human body anywhere outside of the digestive tract. She and Amos had invented a cellulose test so accurate it left almost no doubt: if victims produced a positive result, it was already too late to save them.

“Two,” Murray said. “Both from corpses.”

Positive tests. Just the thought of it made Margaret sick.

The infection was back.

Murray offered Margaret the envelope.

She reached for it, an automatic movement, then she pulled her hand back.

“You don’t want me,” she said, her voice small and weak. “I… this is all horrible, but I put in my time. I can’t go through this again.”

Murray’s lip curled up ever so slightly, a snarling old man who wasn’t used to hearing the word no.

“Worst loss of life in a naval engagement since Vietnam, and it happened right here at home,” he said. “Three ships destroyed, one damaged, about three billion dollars’ worth of military assets gone, and we have no idea what really happened. So pardon my indelicate way of speaking my mind, Montoya, but look at the motherfucking pictures!”

He was going to yell at her? Like she was some intern who would jump at his every word?

“Get Frank Cheng to look at them,” she snapped. “He’s your fair-haired boy.”

Murray nodded. “So you know Cheng’s the lead scientist. I see you haven’t completely tuned out.”

She huffed. “It’s not like Cheng makes it hard. He probably has reporters on speed dial so he can make sure his name gets out there. Send him to your task force. He might even bring along a camera crew.”

Murray’s eyes closed in exasperation. Cheng’s desire to be recognized as a genius clearly rubbed the director the wrong way.

Clarence reached out and took the envelope. Murray slowly sat back — even that minor motion seemed to cause him pain — and stared at Margaret. His fingertips played with the brass double helix atop his cane.

“Operation Wolf Head’s primary research facility is on Black Manitou Island, in Lake Superior,” he said. “That’s where Cheng is. He made the case that he should stay there to provide continuity for the entire process, as opposed to being the first person to examine the bodies.”

Margaret couldn’t hold back a smirk. She should have known Cheng’s desire to be quoted stopped at the edge of any actual danger.

“What a surprise,” she said. “I guess you get what you pay for, Murray.”

The old man’s wrinkled hands tightened on the cane.

“I wanted to pay you,” he said. “You said no. But that doesn’t matter now, because I’m not the one asking this time — I’m here on direct orders from President Blackmon. She wants you on-site, immediately.”

That numb feeling returned. For the second time in Margaret’s life, a sitting president of the United States had asked for her. By name. She’d answered that call once, for Gutierrez; look where that had gotten her, gotten him, gotten everyone.

She heard a rattle of paper. She looked to her left: Clarence had taken the photos out of the slim envelope. He’d looked at them and was now offering them to her.

Margaret still didn’t take them. She knew what would happen if she did.

“Printed pictures, Murray?” she said. “With your black budget you can’t afford a fancy tablet or something?”

“Nothing electronic,” Murray said. “Not out here, anyway. It’s a lot harder to make paper go viral.”

She thought it odd to hear someone that old use a term like go viral. Most people Murray’s age barely understood what the Internet was.

Clarence put the pictures in her lap. She looked down, an instant reaction, saw the one on top, and couldn’t look away.

It was a photo of a drawing: a man sitting in a corner, covered in some kind of bulky blanket. No, not one man… two… maybe even three. There was only one head, but sticking out from the blanket she saw four hands.

The original drawing looked water stained. Whoever had drawn it had done so quickly, yet there was no mistaking the artist’s skill — the subject’s open eyes looked lifeless, stared out into nothing.

Why were the men hidden under the blanket? No, it wasn’t a blanket at all… it was a membrane of some kind, wrapped around dead bodies, parts of it attached to the wall, to the floor. It wasn’t an impressionist’s take; the artist had seen this, or at least thought he’d seen it.

“Murray, what the hell is this?”

“One of the bodies we recovered from the Los Angeles had that on her person,” he said. “The artwork is good enough that we were able to confirm visual ID — the subject of the drawing is Ensign Paul Duchovny, who served onboard the sub. Obviously there are others in there with him, but since we can’t see their faces we can’t identify them.”

“Did you send divers into the sub?”

“No one has gone near it,” Murray said. “The sub is off-limits until we get our analysis team set up. It’s nine hundred feet deep, so people can’t go down without specialized equipment. On top of that, there’s a radiation leak. We don’t even know if it’s safe to enter the wreck. Right now all our intel is coming from UUVs.”

Margaret looked up. “UUVs?”

Clarence answered. “Unmanned underwater vehicles. Sometimes autonomous, like a robot, but most of the time they’re controlled from a person on a surface ship.”

Margaret again looked down at the picture. “Who drew this?”

“Lieutenant Candice Walker,” Murray said. “She escaped the sub, made it to the surface. Unfortunately, she died before divers could get her to medical attention. She was just as crazy as Dawsey — cut off her own arm with a reciprocal saw just below the right elbow. She used her belt for a tourniquet and cauterized the wound, but it wasn’t enough. She escaped the sub by wearing an SEIE suit, a bulky thing that lets submariners rise up without suffering pressure effects. We think her tourniquet came off when she was exiting the sub, or maybe while she ascended. Since she was in the suit, she had no way of tying the belt off again. Her picture is next.”

Margaret flipped to the next page, then hissed in a breath. A dead girl wearing battered, blood-streaked dark-blue coveralls. A lieutenant in the navy, based on her insignia — a highly trained adult, although her face looked all of eighteen. The girl’s right arm was a horrid sight: seared flesh and protruding, blackened bone. Extensive blood loss made her skin extremely pale. She had a bruise under her right eye and a long cut on her left temple.

Margaret thought of the first time she met Perry Dawsey.

He had been a walking nightmare. A massive, naked man, covered in third-degree burns from a fire that had also melted away his hair, leaving his scalp covered with fresh, swelling blisters. His own blood had baked flaky-dry on his skin. A softball-sized pustule on his left collarbone streamed black rot down his wide chest. His knee had been shredded by a bullet fired from the gun of Dew Phillips. And worst of all — even more disturbing than the fact that Perry clutched his own severed penis in a tight fist — the look on his face, those lips caught between a smile and a scream, curled back to show well-cared-for teeth that reflected the winter sun in a wet-white blaze.

Perry, mangled almost beyond recognition. This girl — correction, this naval officer — much the same.

Margaret shuddered, imagining a saw-toothed blade as a buzzing blur, jagged points scraping free a shred of skin or a curl of bone with each pass…

“Did the autopsy confirm she died from blood loss?”

Murray frowned. “You’ve been out of the game longer than I thought, Doc. We didn’t do an autopsy yet. The Los Angeles had a mission to recover pieces of the Orbital. You remember the Orbital, right? The thing that made the most infectious disease we’ve ever seen, a disease that turned people into psychopaths? The thing that made little monsters that tried to open a goddamn gate to another goddamn world? The thing that forced us to nuke the Motor City to stop that gate from opening?”

Margaret felt her own lip curl into a sneer. “Yes, Murray, I so need you to fucking remind me about the fucking Orbital.”

She felt a hand on her arm. Clarence, quietly telling her to ease down.

Murray leaned forward. He spoke quietly, trying to control his rage. “Apparently, you do need a reminder,” he said. “Before Lieutenant Walker died, she admitted to sabotaging the engine room of the Los Angeles. She also admitted to shooting and killing two men. Her corpse and the second body, that of Petty Officer Charles Petrovsky, are in a Biosafety Level Four facility inside the Carl Brashear. They are infected with the same goddamn disease that could have wiped us all out five years ago, that made the crew of the Los Angeles fire on U.S. ships. So no, genius, we haven’t done an autopsy yet. For that, we need the best. We need you.”

Margaret cleared her throat. She’d asked a stupid question and been properly slapped down for it. “You said the Los Angeles found something?”

“Look at the last photo.”

It was a photo of an object she didn’t recognize, some kind of beat-up cylinder sitting on the gray, lifeless lake bottom. The diver or photographer had rested a ruler close by: the cylinder was about five inches long, two and a half inches wide. It was frayed in places, as if it were woven from a synthetic material; like fiberglass, maybe. Detritus and some kind of mold had taken root within the fibers, making the object look fuzzy, almost alive.

“This is from the Orbital?”

“Maybe,” Murray said. “An unmanned probe discovered it six days ago. Five days ago, it was brought onboard the Los Angeles using the most rigorous decontamination and BSL-4 procedures known to man.”

Clarence took the photo. “Not rigorous enough, apparently.”

Murray nodded. “Three days ago, the Los Angeles’s commanding officer reported problematic behavior among the crew. We’re sure that was the beginning of the infection incident.”

Margaret could only imagine how horrible that must have been. A submarine, hundreds of feet below the surface… those people had been trapped in there, nowhere to run.

Clarence handed her back the photo. She stared at it, amazed that she was probably looking at an actual piece of alien hardware. The most significant discovery in human history — a discovery that had already delivered death and promised much more of the same.

“This object,” Margaret said, “is it now onboard the Carl Brashear?”

Murray shook his head. “It remains in the Los Angeles. The sub was struck amidships. The object was in the forward compartment, near the bow. That area appears to be flooded, but otherwise intact. We’re still dealing with fallout from the battle. Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll figure out how to go down and get it out.”

They were going to bring it up. Of course they were.

“Nuke it,” she said. It shocked her to hear those words come out of her mouth, but it was the only way to be sure. Massive ecological damage was a small price to pay for ending the threat. “Do it now. Today, Murray, before it gets out.”

Clarence cleared his throat, a tic of his when he was about to politely contradict her.

“Margo, that’s a big step,” he said. “The biggest. And it’s not like we have a nuclear torpedo — they’d have to figure out how to deliver a nuke and put it right on the money.”

Her eyes never leaving Longworth’s.

“They don’t have to deliver it because it’s already there,” she said. “Right, Murray? There’s a nuke onboard the Los Angeles? Probably about five megatons, enough to completely sterilize everything in a hundred-yard radius?”

The corners of his mouth turned up in a small, wry grin; the master was proud of his pupil. He rubbed his jaw, looked off. Margaret sensed that he had already suggested nuking the site, maybe suggested it to the president herself, and he’d been overruled.

“Destroying it isn’t an option,” Murray said. “If we grab it now, at least we have a chance at containment.”

He was a puppet speaking the words of his controllers.

“This isn’t about containment,” Margaret said. “The military wants it. They want to see if we can get some genuine alien technology. Great choice on the risk-benefit analysis, Murray.”

He shifted in his seat. “Spare me a lecture, Doc. It’s not my choice. I’ve got my orders. We need to know how that object affected the crew — is this the same thing we saw before or a new phase in the disease’s development? Finding that answer could literally save the world.”

Margaret looked down at the pictures. She tidied them up, then slid them back into the envelope.

She held the envelope out to Murray.

“I already saved the world,” she said. “Twice. I can’t, Murray… I just can’t.”

He struggled to stand. He leaned on the cane, took a step closer to her. His eyes burned with fury. She could see his too-white dentures.

“You hide in this house like a coward,” he said. “You’ve seen horrible things? You’ve done your part? So have I. So has Clarence. So have thousands of other people, and they keep on doing their part. You have a knack for understanding this thing, Margaret. You are the only reason we stopped it last time. You. So how about you pull your head out of your ass, put your pity party to bed, pack a bag and come with me, because I don’t care if you saved the world once, twice, or fifty fucking times” — he shook the cane head at her, the ceiling light glinting dully off the brass helix — “your job isn’t done. You got the short end of the stick, Margaret. Maybe you’re not a soldier, but you man the wall just like the rest of us.”

Not a soldier. She looked at Clarence. For a moment, she wondered if he’d talked to Murray earlier, if they’d set that up together, but the look on his face said otherwise. Her husband was ashamed he’d said that to her.

She loved him. If this thing got out, he would die. So would she. So would everyone.

You got the short end of the stick, Margaret.

Murray was right. She hated him for it.

“I’ll go,” she said.

Clarence stood. “We’ll be ready in thirty minutes.”

“Hell no,” Margaret said. “The area is possibly contagious. There’s no benefit to putting you at risk.”

I can’t take seeing you every day; I can barely even look at you right now.

Clarence started to say something, but Murray clonked the bottom of his cane on the floor.

“Stop this,” he said. “You two handle your relationship issues on your own time. Otto is going with you.”

She turned on the old man. “Hold on just a damn second. If you want me there, then you —”

“He’s coming,” Murray snapped. “Doc, you are the only choice for this job, but forgive me for being an insensitive prick when I say that you might not be playing with a full deck. Otto has been taking care of you for years. He’s the best qualified to keep you focused.”

“Great,” Margaret said. “So you’re assigning a babysitter?”

“I’ll assign a midget with a whip if that’s what it takes to keep you from reading blog posts about yourself for fifteen hours a day.”

Margaret fell silent. Murray knew all about how far she’d fallen. Of course he knew. Clarence had probably told him.

Murray reached out and took the envelope from her.

“Get packed,” he said. “A car will be here for you in fifteen minutes.”

HIGHWAY TO HELL

Cooper Mitchell stared at the accounting program on his computer screen. He willed the numbers to change. The numbers didn’t cooperate.

The force is not strong with this one…

He looked at the company checkbook. Specifically, he looked at the check stub, frayed edges lonely for the check that should have been there.

“Goddamit, Brockman,” Cooper said. “How many times do we have to go through this?”

There was no information on the check stub, of course — Jeff never bothered to do that. Maybe this would be one of the lucky times when he hadn’t spent that much, when he actually came back with a receipt, when his impulse purchase wouldn’t make their account overdrawn. Again.

Cooper rested his elbows on the messy desk, his face in his hands. The dented, rust-speckled metal desk took up most of the small, cinder-block office. The “Steelcase Dreadnaught,” as Jeff called it. It weighed some 250 pounds. Cooper could barely budge the thing; Jeff had once picked it up by himself, held it over his head just to prove that he could. The desk had been here when they’d bought the building and would probably be there when they sold it.

Which, if they didn’t get a client soon, would be within weeks.

Their building bordered the St. Joseph’s River, but the office’s only window didn’t offer that view. Instead, it looked out onto a bare concrete floor. The place had been a construction company garage once; maybe the window was where the foreman watched his people toil away, loudly growling get back to work! every time someone slacked off. The tall, deep shelves lining the walls were filled with diving gear (some functioning, most not), welding rigs, heavy-duty tools and other equipment. He and Jeff hadn’t used some of the pieces in years, but in the underwater construction business you never got rid of something that was already paid for. Never knew when you might need it.

In the middle of the shop floor sat Jeff’s pet project: an old, sixteen-foot racing scow that he had been meaning to fix up for the last five years. The boat, of course, had been purchased with one of the mystery checks. That check had bounced. Jeff still got the scow, though. Since the day they’d met in the third grade, the man could talk Cooper into damn near anything.

Jeff had put in all of eight or nine hours on the scow before he got bored with it, moved on to the next shiny object. But not a day went by when he didn’t talk about making it pristine, selling it for a huge profit. Jeff loved the thing. Cooper wondered if someone would buy it as-is. Maybe it could bring in enough to make that month’s payment on JBS’s only ship, the Mary Ellen Moffett.

Maybe, if anyone was buying. In this economy, no one was.

Through the window, he saw the building’s front door open. Jeff Brockman walked in, carrying a blue SCUBA tank under his left arm. A few brown, windblown leaves came in with him, one sticking to his heavy, shoulder-length hair of the same color. From his right hand dangled an overstuffed white plastic bag — take-out food.

Cooper forced himself to stay calm. A new tank? Maybe Jeff had found it. Maybe he hadn’t spent money they didn’t have on equipment they didn’t need.

Yeah, and maybe Cooper would suddenly find out he was a long-lost relative of Hugh Hefner and had just inherited the Playboy Mansion.

Jeff Brockman strode into the tiny office, blazing a smile that said I totally hooked us up!

“My man,” he said. “Wait till you hear the deal I just scored.”

Cooper pointed to the open checkbook. “A deal you paid for with that?”

Jeff looked at the checkbook, drew in an apologetic hiss.

“Oh, right,” he said. “Sorry, dude. I know, I know, you told me a hundred times. I’ll fill in the stub thing right now.” He looked around for space on his desk to set the food. “The receipt’s in my pocket. I think. Or maybe I left it at the dive shop.”

Cooper stared, amazed. Jeff moved a stack of bills aside, cleared a space to set down the bag. Through the strained plastic, Cooper counted five containers — had to be enough food there to feed a half-dozen grown men. And the odor… Italian. Fuck if it didn’t smell delicious.

“It’s not about the stub,” Cooper said. “Well, yeah, it’s about that, too, but, dude, we don’t need a new tank!”

Jeff looked the part of rugged entrepreneur: the hair, the two-day stubble, the wide shoulders, and the blue eyes that made meeting girls at the bar so easy he didn’t even have to try.

He smiled. “Coop, buddy, I got a great deal. We’ll need to replace my tank in a couple of years anyway, so I actually saved us money.”

Cooper stood up, slapped his desk hard enough that the thick metal thoomed like a cheap gong.

“You don’t save money by spending it, Brock!”

Jeff’s good humor faded away. His expression hardened. They hung out together all day, most every day, and that familiarity made Cooper forget that Jeff had thirty pounds and four inches on him, made him forget that Jeff carried layers of muscle built over a lifetime of construction and demolition jobs, made him not really see the little, faded scars on Jeff’s face collected from the fights of his youth. That expression, though, made Cooper remember those things all too well.

“Coop, I own half of this company. I think I can take a little money to treat us once in a while, bro. I don’t need permission to write a check.”

“No, what you do need is enough money in the checking account to cover the check. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.”

Jeff nodded. “Stupid, huh? Was I stupid when I convinced my brother to get you into that medical trial? Was I stupid when I somehow kept this business going while you were in the hospital for six months? Maybe it was just a miracle we didn’t go out of business, maybe it wasn’t because I worked two goddamn jobs to keep us afloat so you could get your goddamn life back.”

Cooper’s face flushed. He looked away.

It was almost hard to remember what the lupus did to him: the fatigue, the swollen joints, the chest pain… all of it had threatened not only his ability to work, but his life as well. Jeff had stood by him. Jeff had called in all the favors he had with his brother, a doctor in Grand Rapids, to get Cooper into an experimental gene-therapy trial. The trial had worked. Most of Cooper’s symptoms were gone. As long as he went in every three months for booster injections, the doctors told him the symptoms would always be gone.

Still, the past was the past, and if they didn’t do things right, there wouldn’t be a future.

“Come on, man,” Cooper said. “You know I’m grateful for that, but it doesn’t help our business right now.”

Jeff reached up, flipped his hair back. “Saving your life doesn’t help our business? You ever saved my life?”

Oh, now it was Jeff who wanted to forget how things had been? He wasn’t the only one who could lay a guilt trip.

“Brock, my family is the only reason you have a life, bro.”

As soon as Cooper said the words, he wanted to unsay them. There were some places friends just didn’t go, no matter how mad they got.

Jeff and his brother had come from a broken home. When their father finally left them and their alcoholic mother, the boys had little guidance and even less help. Jeff’s brother had been sixteen; he’d been old enough to make his own way, to attack life and take what he wanted. Jeff, however, had been ten years old — he’d been lost. Cooper’s mom had all but adopted him, given Jeff love, support and discipline when his birth mother provided none of the above. Jeff had spent at least half his high school years sleeping at Cooper’s place. To say the two of them had grown up together was more than just a figure of speech.

Cooper felt like an asshole. He could tell Jeff felt the same way. They’d both gone too far.

Jeff sighed. “Hungry?”

He opened the bag of food, offered Cooper a Styrofoam container.

One sniff told Cooper what it was. “Roma’s green tomato parmesan?”

Jeff raised his eyebrows twice in rapid succession. “Who’s your friend?” he said. “Who’s your buddy? I am, aren’t I?”

Cooper laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“Just because you’ve got a dead-on impression of Bill Murray from Stripes doesn’t mean we’re not broke.”

“Broke, schmoke,” Jeff said. “Something will come up. You gotta think on the bright —”

From Jeff’s pocket, his cell phone rang: the three-chord-crunch opening of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”

He answered. “JBS Salvage, we got the skills if you got the bills. This is Jeff himself speaking.” He listened for a few seconds. “You’re right outside? Sure, come on in.”

Jeff slid the phone back into his pocket and smiled at Cooper. “See? God provides, my son. A potential customer is coming in to talk to us.”

They walked onto the shop floor just as the main door opened. In came a skinny Asian kid. Early twenties, maybe. All of five-foot-eight, with shiny black hair that hung heavy almost to his eyes. His dark blue hoodie had BERKELEY on the chest in block yellow letters. A gray computer bag hung over his left shoulder. From the way the strap dug into the sweatshirt, it looked like he was carrying a lot more than just a computer.

Jeff and Cooper walked around the racing scow to meet the man.

“Hi there,” Jeff said. “Can we help you?”

The kid smiled uncomfortably. “Uh, yes. Are you Mister Brockman?”

Cooper had expected to hear an accent, Chinese or Korean, Japanese maybe, but not a trace.

Jeff flashed his trademark grin. “Depends on who’s asking,” he said. “If you’re a bill collector, my name is Hugo Chavez.”

The kid stared, blinked. “Chavez?” He shook his head. “Oh, no, I’m not a bill collector. My name is Steve Stanton. I want to hire your boat.”

Jeff looked at Cooper. Cooper knew what his partner was thinking — this kid certainly wasn’t the type who worked in the marine construction and salvage industry. Cooper shrugged.

Jeff offered his hand. “Jeff Brockman.” The kid shook the hand, winced a little at Jeff’s overzealous grip.

“Ah, sorry,” Jeff said. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength, know what I mean? This is my partner, Cooper Mitchell.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cooper said, shaking the kid’s hand. “What kind of work do you need?”

Stanton adjusted his computer bag. It was so heavy he had to lean to the side a little to balance himself.

“My boss is looking for Northwest Airlines Flight 2501.”

Cooper felt a spark of excitement, of hope — if this kid was some kind of treasure hunter, he might have money for the job. No one was going to find Flight 2501, but that didn’t matter if he could write a check that wouldn’t bounce.

“It went down in 1950 over Lake Michigan,” Stanton said. “It was a DC-4, flying from New York to Minneapolis, had to—”

“Reroute due to weather,” Jeff finished. “We’re familiar. Fifty-eight people died, worst crash in American history at the time, blah-blah-blah, and so on and so forth. It’s the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes. No one has found the wreckage.”

Steve looked surprised that Jeff knew about the disaster. If this kid thought he’d discovered something unique, he didn’t know a damn thing about the Lakes culture.

“No, no one found the wreckage,” he said. “Or the bodies.”

Jeff smiled and looked to the ceiling. This wasn’t his overeager whatever it takes to win your business smile, but rather his I smell bullshit and you’re wasting my time smile. Cooper wanted to strangle his friend: just play along, you idiot.

“Got news for you,” Jeff said. “After all this time, there ain’t gonna be no bodies.”

Steve Stanton laughed, the sound short and choppy, overly loud. “That’s the point,” he said. “That’s why the insurance companies never paid out to the families of the crash victims, because no bodies were found.”

This was a play for insurance money?

Cooper’s hope sparked higher. “You don’t look like a lawyer, Mister Stanton.”

“I’m not, but my boss is,” Steve said. “He’s gathered a bunch of descendants together and is ready to file a huge lawsuit on their behalf. All kinds of compound interest and stuff, it’s gonna be mad stacks.”

Mad stacks? Cooper looked at Jeff. Jeff shrugged: he didn’t know what it meant either.

“Money,” the kid said. “A lot of money.”

That Cooper understood.

“But Northwest isn’t even around anymore.”

Steve nodded. “No. Delta is, though. They bought out Northwest, and they’ve got deep pockets.”

Jeff ran his fingers through his hair, lifted it, let the heavy strands drop down a few at a time.

“People have been looking for 2501 for decades,” he said. “Experts, people who make me look like I know nothing, and trust me, buddy, I know a lot. Besides… if it’s in the deep water, like below three hundred feet, we just don’t have the equipment for that.”

Cooper felt a pain in his jaw — he was grinding his teeth together. Couldn’t Jeff just be a little dishonest for once?

Steve Stanton smiled. “I don’t need you to find it, or go down and get it. I’m an engineer. I designed a remotely operated vehicle that can cover a lot of ground faster and better than anything that came before it. You guys take me out for a few days, maybe a week, we let the ROV survey the bottom for a few days, see if we get lucky and make my boss happy.”

Jeff sighed, crossed his arms. He tilted his head a little to the right, an expression Cooper knew all too well. Jeff was about to show Stanton the door. Cooper had to do something, fast, something that would change Jeff’s mind.

“It would be expensive,” Cooper said. “Jeff’s well-known reputation as a navigator, his expert knowledge of the lake, and the weather is going to be a factor, of course, and—”

Steve Stanton reached into his sweatshirt pocket, pulled out a neat, bank-bound bundle of hundred-dollar bills. He held it up.

“Will this get us started?”

Cooper stared at it. So did Jeff. That certainly wasn’t going to bounce. The bills smelled new. They smelled even better than the green tomato parmesan. That bundle alone would make the payment on the Mary Ellen and catch them up on three months of back utilities.

“Let me guess,” Jeff said. “That’s a mad stack?”

Steve laughed his too-loud laugh. “This one isn’t even a little ticked off, man. What will it cost to hire you?”

Before Cooper could speak, Jeff gave a number that was triple their normal rate. Cooper froze — Stanton could turn around and hire a boat from one of the big companies for half that. Jeff was actually trying to price JBS out of the job.

Steve Stanton swallowed, licked his lips. He looked nervous. Maybe he wasn’t authorized to pay that much?

“Okay,” he said. “If we can leave tonight, you’re hired. I’ll pay for the first week in advance.”

Cooper Mitchell was a shitty poker player, and he knew it. Always had been. He tried to stay perfectly still, wondered if any tells showed how bad he wanted this job.

Jeff, however, was an amazing poker player. Probably because he didn’t know how truly full of shit he was, and he believed whatever story poured from his mouth at that given moment.

“Tonight,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s a storm coming in right now. Tonight’s not a good idea. Listen, I appreciate you wanting to hire us, but I have to be honest with you, you’re better off—”

“I’ll double your rate,” Steve said. He looked like he might start hyperventilating. “But only if we leave tonight.”

Six times their normal day rate? And he’d pay a full week in advance? This was it, this was the job that could turn everything around.

Cooper looked at Jeff, waited for his partner to accept the job.

But instead, Jeff shook his head.

“I think you might want someone else,” he said.

Cooper reached out, grabbed his best friend’s elbow.

“Jeff, can I talk to you in the office for a moment?” The words came out cold. Jeff looked down at Cooper’s hand.

Cooper let go, tilted his head toward the office. “Now, please.”

Jeff sighed, smiled at Steve. “Would you excuse us a moment?”

The two partners walked into the cinder-block building within a building. Cooper shut the door.

“Brockman, what the fuck, bro?”

Jeff shook his head. “Dude, the job is bullshit.”

“What do you mean it’s bullshit?”

“I quoted him a metric fuck-ton of money, he didn’t blink,” Jeff said. “For that kind of scratch, he could hire the bigger companies all up and down the coast. And cash? And Flight 2501? Come on, man, that’s never been found and it’s never gonna be found. It’s like he’s trying to entice us with, I don’t know, the thing that has the most glory attached just in case the cash isn’t enough.”

“Who cares? Glory or no glory, someone wants this computer nerd’s little toy out on the water. Maybe Mister Stanton doesn’t know what a normal rate is.”

Jeff let out a half-huff, half-laugh. “Mister Stanton? He’s half our age, man.”

“Is that what this is about? That a twenty-five-year-old kid can come in here with enough cash to make us jump?”

Jeff looked away, scratched at his stubble. Yeah, that was the problem. Part of it, anyway. Both Cooper and Jeff were pushing forty. Every day, they grew more and more aware that they had no money in the bank. No wives. No children. They’d been in business together for two decades. They’d passed up going to college to be the captains of their own ship, literally, and they were one letter from the bank away from having nothing to show for it. Their big plans for a fleet had never materialized.

Cooper had changed his ways: partied less, paid more attention to the books, the business, changed his diet… whatever it took to grow up, to accept that his youth had passed him by. Jeff refused to let go of his. Cooper wasn’t even sure the man could let go.

Jeff begrudgingly nodded. “Okay, that bugs me. But that’s not why we need to pass, bro. This is too good to be true. It’s skunky.”

Skunky: Jeff’s word for a superstitious belief that if something didn’t feel right, it was bound to go wrong.

“You don’t do the books,” Cooper said. “We’re in a lot of trouble, dude. We need this gig.”

Jeff bit at his lower lip. “I’m telling you, we should take another job.”

“You want another job? How does busing tables at Big Boy sound? Because that’s where we’ll be if we pass this up.”

Jeff looked down, stared at his work-booted toe scraping a circle against the concrete floor.

“It’s skunky,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

For as long as he could remember, Cooper had trusted his friend’s instincts. Although they were partners, Jeff was the de facto leader — but where had that gotten them?

Cooper put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “Dude, I’m begging you. Just this once, will you trust me?”

Jeff inhaled a long, slow breath that seemed too big for his lungs. He let it all out in a whoosh.

“Okay, I’m in,” he said. “We’re going to need a third guy. With this kind of money we could stop hiring under the table.”

Cooper shook his head. “Let’s use José. We still haven’t paid him for the last two jobs. We owe him.”

Jeff tilted his head back. “Damn, I forgot we haven’t paid him.”

Of course Jeff had forgotten. Cooper had what he wanted, so there was no point in digging on Jeff for that.

Jeff smiled, clapped his hands together, rubbed them vigorously.

“José it is,” he said. “Let’s go tell Mister Stanton he’s hired himself a boat.”

INFLUENCE OF THE SONOFABITCH

Choices had been made.

The Orbital had never possessed true sentience. That didn’t mean, however, that it didn’t have a logic process. It still had to think. It had to create questions, evaluate those questions, form hypothetical strategies and use the data it possessed to evaluate probable results.

The Orbital had limited resources. Some of those resources needed to be used in an attempt to create new weapons, new strategies. Logic also dictated, however, that some resources needed to be used on three existing, proven designs: hatchlings, crawlers, and mommies.

Hatchlings moved fast. They could build up or tear down defenses. They could swarm, they could attack. They could kill.

Crawlers turned humans into murderers that slaughtered their own kind. Crawler-infected humans could still use weapons, vehicles and tools. They could work together, take and give orders, function as an organized force. And perhaps far more important, a crawler-infected human could infect others.

Mommies had been created by Chelsea — not by the Orbital, but that didn’t matter. The design turned humans into spore-filled gasbags. Mommies couldn’t fight or build, but they were an extremely efficient vector for mass infection.

Those designs filled specific roles. All three were included in the Orbital’s last salvo.

But they weren’t enough.

The Orbital needed new troops, new weapons. It had to create something… better.

The pure, brute force of the “sonofabitch” had defeated the Orbital’s early attempts. The Orbital had learned from that and would use similar tactics in one of its final designs. This fourth design wouldn’t just affect the host’s brain; it would overwhelm the host’s entire body, transform it, providing strength, rage, aggression, toughness, brutality… a fitting monument to the only human who had dug hatchlings out of his own body. Were the Orbital capable of emotion, that fourth design might have been the product of spite. Or, possibly, of hatred.

Brute force had stopped the Orbital’s attempts, but so, too, had intelligence. The fifth design would harness the human intellect, shape it, turn it into a weapon. The most brilliant humans would be transformed into leaders, generals that could manage the war long after the Orbital had perished.

To protect such a vital strategical asset, the Orbital had spent much of its remaining days finding a way to hide these leaders — not only could they direct a growing army, they could also function in a covert role, hiding among the humans until the right time to strike.

Three proven designs. Two designs as-yet untested when the Orbital crashed into Lake Michigan.

The Orbital would never know just how successful those last two designs turned out to be.

THE SITUATION ROOM

Murray Longworth had a dream.

That dream consisted of a giant bonfire, a bonfire made from the long, heavy, wooden table that sat in the White House’s Situation Room. Throw in the wood paneling as well; that would burn up real nice. Not the video monitors that lined those walls, though — he would set those up around the bonfire and play some shit on them that had nothing to do with saving the world: a Zeppelin concert, maybe some playoffs for whatever sport was in season, a few cartoons, perhaps, and — for sure — at least three screens playing constitutionally protected good old-fashioned American porn. He’d have a keg. He’d hire some strippers a third his age to sit around in bikinis and laugh at his jokes. He’d warm his old bones in the heat of that bonfire, get crocked, and celebrate the death of the room he hated so much.

“Murray?”

He blinked, came back to the moment. He was in that very Situation Room of his brief daydream, but there was no bonfire, no keg, and no porn. Images of Lake Michigan played across the screens. Instead of strippers, he was looking at some of the only people who knew the entire history of the situation, from Perry Dawsey’s naked run for freedom right up to the sinking of the Los Angeles.

“Murray?”

The president of the United States of America had called his name. Twice. Sandra Blackmon stared at him. She wore a red business suit. She always wore red. She did not look happy with him. In his defense, the only time she did look happy was when the news cameras were on her. There were no news cameras in the Situation Room.

Murray sat up straighter. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, waiting for his mental playback loop to retrieve the question his conscious mind had missed. Forty years of marriage had developed that skill, the ability to make part of his brain record words even when he wasn’t paying attention at all. His wife would ask, Are you listening to me?, and Murray could regurgitate the last ten or fifteen seconds of what she’d said. The same skill came in handy during these meetings.

His playback loop brought up her question: Did you get Montoya?

“Yes, Madam President,” he said. “Doctor Montoya is on her way to the task force. She’ll report to the Carl Brashear, where we have the remains of Lieutenant Walker and Petty Officer Petrovsky.”

President Blackmon nodded, just once. Murray thought the motion made her look like a parrot.

“Excellent,” she said. “Lord willing, maybe Montoya can find something that other person you have running the show could not. What’s that man’s name again?”

“Cheng,” Murray said. “Doctor Frank Cheng.”

Blackmon nodded once. “Yes, Doctor Cheng. Why isn’t he on the Brashear already?”

Murray’s teeth clenched. “Doctor Cheng is at Black Manitou Island, overseeing preparation for the delivery of any samples that Montoya sends out for more detailed analysis.”

Blackmon’s mouth twisted to the left, a tell that she wasn’t buying it. Most people bought into Cheng’s grandstanding bullshit. Murray did not. Neither, apparently, did President Blackmon.

“Fine,” she said. “He can stay there and prep. I wanted Montoya on the case, and she is, so we’ll put our full trust in her.”

If Murray could have lived out his bonfire fantasy, he knew some of the people in this room would eagerly join him. Others, no. These were among the most powerful people in the country: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security advisor, the secretary of defense, the director of homeland security, the secretary of state… the nation’s decision makers, gathered together to help President Blackmon chart a path in this dangerous time.

She turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Samuel Porter.

“Admiral, you’re absolutely certain the Los Angeles didn’t succumb to enemy actions? Our regular enemies, I mean. I want the world to know that we are ready to strike back against anyone who thinks we are weak.”

Sam Porter took in a deep breath. He looked down. No matter what the situation, he took his time answering a serious question. His pale skin made Murray think the man had been a submariner himself, an extended absence from sunlight causing his body to jettison any color as unnecessary baggage. Maybe Porter had even spent time on the Los Angeles as he moved up the ranks.

“Madam President,” the admiral said, “we have no indication of any terrestrial forces in the Great Lakes area, or anywhere on the American theater. We have firsthand accounts from the Pinckney. There is no question here — American forces attacked American forces. This is, officially, the worst friendly-fire incident in U.S. history.”

Blackmon pursed her lips, held them there as she thought. Fifteen years ago that same expression might have looked alluring. Now it showed the lines around her mouth, at the corners of her eyes.

Like Porter, Blackmon took her time to think things through. She didn’t rush. That made the two of them get along quite well. For the bystanders, however, watching them converse was like watching paint dry.

Blackmon had swept to power amid anti-Democratic fervor aimed at President Gutierrez, who had made the fatal mistake of trusting in the intelligence of the American people. An alien pathogen had turned regular Joes and Janes into psychopaths, had spawned a nightmarish version of little green men, and Gutierrez told the people the truth.

What an idiot.

Half the country hadn’t believed him then. Even less believed him now. Blackmon had been merciless in her campaign, citing Gutierrez’s inability to keep the country safe, hammering on the fact that, as president, he’d “allowed” the worst disaster in American history. Those things alone should have been enough, but she’d gone one step further. Without coming out and actually saying it, her allusions and insinuations made her stance clear: since God created everything, and the Bible was the immutable word of God, and the Bible didn’t talk about aliens, well, then there couldn’t be aliens — therefore Gutierrez was lying.

Murray had watched, stunned, as a man who told the truth was washed out of office by a nation that didn’t want to believe humanity was not alone in the universe. Blackmon hadn’t rallied just the Bible thumpers. No, you couldn’t win in America anymore if you only paid attention to the religious Right. You also needed the Koran thumpers, the Talmud thumpers, and the thumpers of all moldy old books suitable for thumping. She found a way to gather all of those people into her fold without alienating her Christian base. Countering her strategy, practically every scientist in the country stood firmly behind Gutierrez. They trotted out papers and studies and formulas that proved he was telling the truth, yet that didn’t matter.

When it comes to politics and tragedy, in the end people need someone to blame.

A nation aching with loss and reeling with disbelief had chosen Blackmon. Piousness and ultraconservative views felt like the perfect counter to the science-minded liberal who ran the show when a mushroom cloud blossomed over Detroit.

When the landslide election results came in, Murray had hoped Blackmon’s religious rhetoric was just a way to get her into power. It was politics, after all — say whatever you have to say to get elected. But Murray had come to realize that her brilliant election strategy wasn’t a show.

Sandra Blackmon believed.

In closed-door meetings like this, President Blackmon accepted that America had nearly been invaded by some kind of strange force. She also acknowledged that Gutierrez had played the only card available to stop a disaster that could have taken out the entire Midwest, possibly the nation, maybe the entire world. The problem was, she didn’t believe that force came from somewhere other than Earth. Most of the time, she acted like the attack had to have come from another country: Russia, China, maybe even India (for which she had an inexplicable hatred).

Sometimes, however, the president of the United States of America said things that made it sound like she thought the attack was Satanic in nature. The fact that she might believe that, and she had her finger on the button? The thought made Murray’s balls — what were left of them, anyway — shrivel up into little fear-peanuts that tried to crawl up into his belly and hide.

Blackmon turned to André Vogel, a man who — in Murray’s humble opinion — should have walked around with a coating of slime all over him and his fancy clothes.

“Director Vogel,” she said. “What about spies? Any more information on Lieutenant Walker’s background? Could she have been turned?”

“It’s possible,” Vogel said. “So far, however, we have nothing.”

Murray knew that people sometimes said his department, the Department of Special Threats, was the second-most-important government organization you’d probably never heard of. The first? The Special Collections Service. Part NSA, part CIA and all black-budget, Special Collections existed well outside the framework of official government business. André Vogel was exactly the kind of shifty motherfucker needed to run it.

“Walker seems to be as red, white and blue as they come,” Vogel said. “Naval Intelligence and the FBI are looking into the entire crew of the Los Angeles, Madam President. That’s a big job. But if a foreign power is at the root of this, we will find out.”

Typical Vogel-speak: casually mention the difficulty of the task, but also promise results.

Blackmon leaned back in her chair. “What about the Chinese? The NSA reported there was chatter shortly after the attack. Can we be sure the Chinese weren’t involved?”

Vogel shook his head. “No, Madam President, we can’t be sure. We’re listening. They know something crashed into Lake Michigan five years ago. President Gutierrez informed the whole world that we had visitors, so it’s easy for the Chinese to put two and two together. Regardless, though, they can’t do anything with that knowledge. Even if they had a sub within a hundred miles of our coast, they couldn’t get it through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and into the Great Lakes.”

“They’ve got money,” Murray said. Heads turned to look at him, eyebrows raised because he’d spoken out of turn. He ignored them all, just stared at Vogel.

“The Chinese have more money than they know what to do with,” Murray said. “Do we really know for sure they couldn’t just quietly hire locals to go down and get the thing?”

Vogel smiled, looking smug. “The probable crash site is seven hundred to nine hundred feet deep. You need specialized gear for that. The intelligence community has been consistently monitoring all domestic companies that have the right kind of equipment, with a special eye on Lake Michigan outfits, of course. Canadian and Mexican companies as well. The navy task force made short work of discouraging filmmakers, reporters, documentarians, even conspiracy theorists from venturing into a maritime exclusion zone.”

He sat back, gave his bald head a quick, damp rub. “The only way anyone could steal our alien technology, which we haven’t even secured yet, would be to invade the United States of America and occupy Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.”

The man knew his business, no doubt, but after all this time he still didn’t get the big picture.

“I’m not talking about stealing it,” Murray said. “I’m talking about touching it. We just lost a nuclear sub, a destroyer, a cutter and over four hundred brave men and women. That didn’t happen by accident. If the wreckage was somehow contaminated with any of the contagious shit that forced us to nuke Detroit, then the Chinese don’t have to get the thing out of the country, they just have to be dumb enough to go down and try. That alone could be enough to goat-fuck us right in the ass.”

“That’s enough,” President Blackmon said.

Murray didn’t know if she’d had that voice of unquestionable authority before she took over as commander in chief, but she sure as shit had it now.

“This briefing is over,” she said. “I think Director Vogel has clearly illustrated that the site is protected against espionage. He’s doing his job. Murray, you do yours. Find out what turned the crew of the Los Angeles into traitors, and find out fast.”

Margaret’s belly wanted to be sick, but Margaret was in charge of such things and she was not going to let this helicopter ride make her throw up.

She’d spent most of the last three years sequestered in her house. Now here she was, at 4:00 A.M., in a loud-as-hell helicopter streaking across the black surface of Lake Michigan, strapped tightly into an uncomfortable seat and wearing an ill-fitting helmet. Her soon-to-be-ex husband sat next to her, a constant reminder of her failures as a wife.

How had Murray talked her into this?

Maybe it hadn’t been Murray at all. Maybe it was because the infection had returned, and she couldn’t stand aside while others fought that evil for her.

Before “Project Tangram,” before she and Amos stumbled onto something that would turn out to be one of humankind’s biggest and worst discoveries, she had been an epidemiologist with the CDC. She hadn’t been a “nobody,” by any stretch, but no one had really known who she was.

The infection changed all that.

She moved from a back room to the front line. She had become the one, the person who figured it out, who stopped it. Doing so had cost so many lives; it had destroyed hers as well.

She should have been a celebrity, a hero. She should have been an icon of the scientific world. Instead, she had suffered so much in the past five years. Lost so much. She wasn’t going to let that be for nothing.

You will not win. I WILL beat you.

The pilot’s voice came over the headphones built into her helmet.

“We’re coming up on the task force,” he said. “We’re on high alert, so this will be a slow approach as they make sure everything is okay. If you look out the port side, you can see the task force coming up pretty quick.”

Margaret readjusted her loose helmet as she looked. Rain pounded against the helicopter’s windshield. She could see no stars, nothing but black above and below. Then, in the distance, she saw the glow of lights.

Warships, on the Great Lakes. And the concept of lake didn’t really register — she couldn’t see land in any direction, not even the distant sparkle of cities or towns.

As the helicopter closed in, the faint lights of the four gray ships became more clear. The ships were big… so big they seemed to ignore tall, black, undulating swells that could have dragged normal boats to the bottom. The longest of the gray ships looked boxy, like a cargo hauler. Two others were nearly as big but had the sleek lines of combat vessels. One rode tall in the water, pristine and impressive, while the other listed slightly to port, parts of its superstructure blackened and twisted. It took her a moment to realize the two ships were identical, a before-and-after image representing the effects of combat. The smallest of the four didn’t look like any ship she had ever seen.

Margaret pulled on Clarence’s sleeve and pointed at the identical pair’s undamaged ship. She tried to lean into him and cracked her helmet against his. He reached up, tapped the helmet’s microphone sitting directly in front of her mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.” She didn’t need to yell over the helicopter’s engine to be heard. She pointed out again. “What is that?”

“That’s the Pinckney,” Clarence said. “Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer. It’s the flagship of the flotilla. The one that’s listing is the Truxtun. The one that looks like a tanker is the Carl Brashear. That’s where we’re headed. It’s about seven hundred feet long, so your motion sickness should settle down once we’re aboard.”

She hadn’t told him she felt ill. He just knew.

Margaret gestured to the final ship, the smallest of the four. Its long, thin, pointed nose widened near the base, flaring out into the superstructure, which itself led to a flat, square back deck. The ship’s steeply sloped sides reminded her, somewhat, of the old Civil War ironclads, and yet the vessel’s overall appearance was that of a spaceship from a science fiction movie. On the back deck, she saw two helicopters, ready and waiting.

“That’s the Coronado,” Clarence said. “It’s new. It’s called a littoral combat ship.”

“So it literally does combat?”

“Not lit-ER-al, lit-OR-al,” he said. “It means close in to shore. That’s where SEAL Team Two is.”

Guided missile destroyers. Littoral combat ships. SEALs. This was the equivalent of putting a floating flag in the middle of Lake Michigan and telling the rest of the world this is ours, and if you even look this way, you’re going to get a black eye.

How typical. Five years after what could have been the extinction of the human race, and her government chose to rattle its saber instead of working with other countries to share the biggest scientific discovery in history.

And yet as impressive as three of the four ships looked, she realized that just a day ago there had been a total of seven: two more on the surface, one below. Somehow, the infection had taken them out.

I will beat you.

The helicopter suddenly plummeted, an elevator with the cable cut. Just as quickly the drop ended with a hard rattle that bounced her in her seat and jostled her loose helmet.

“Sorry about that,” said the pilot’s voice in her earphones. “The wind is pretty tricky. Turbulence is going to be rough as we come in to land. Hold tight.”

Something seemed to slap the helicopter’s left side. Margaret’s stomach let out a brief-but-intense prepuke warning. She started to look for something to throw up in, but Clarence was already offering her an open barf bag.

Margaret held it to her mouth as she discovered that she was not, after all, in charge of such things. She kept throwing up as the helicopter descended toward the Carl Brashear.

MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION

Steve Stanton stood at the rail of the Mary Ellen Moffett, wondering if the phrase “freezing your nuts off” was less a figure of speech and more an accurate scientific possibility.

He stared out at an endless black surface, not that he could see all that far at 5:00 A.M. on a starless morning. November wind tore at his raincoat. Five-foot swells slapped against the hull, splashing icy spray into his face. He’d been out on the lake dozens of times while testing the Platypus, but until this moment he had never, in his entire life, been in a place where he couldn’t see land. He felt like a shivering speck in the middle of nowhere, like a satellite surrounded by the expanse of space.

Bo Pan stood next to him. The old man had already thrown up over the rail once. He looked like he might soon do so again.

It was hard to believe that just twelve hours earlier, Steve had been sunning himself in a lawn chair. As soon as the Mary Ellen Moffett left the dock, the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees. The growing wind dragged it down at least another fifteen. The Gore-Tex foul-weather gear he’d bought (with some of Bo Pan’s wad of cash, thank you very much) was rated for temperatures well below this, and yet still Steve felt wet and cold. When he got back, he’d write a stern letter of complaint to the manufacturer’s customer service department.

Steve found himself caught between excitement and fear. Despite years of preparation, it seemed impossible to believe that he was here — to possibly acquire a piece of something created by an extraterrestrial race.

“Bo Pan,” Steve said in a whisper that was lost on the wind. He leaned in closer and spoke louder. “Bo Pan, do you really think the location is accurate?”

Bo Pan shrugged. He looked miserable, but resigned to the misery, like a wet sheep patiently waiting out a hailstorm. Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spit it over the side. The man had cornered the market on phlegm.

“I do not know,” he said. “I was told to bring you here, and to launch your creation that way.” He pointed starboard, to the north.

Steve stared out. Maybe his destiny was out there, nine hundred feet below the surface. He could be the one to find it, to bring it back for the glory of China. If what lay on the bottom provided new technology, if it was or helped create a weapon, his country needed it. Hard times were coming to the world. America would not give up her place at the top without a fight. The People’s Party had spent decades preparing for that final shift to ascendancy — it wouldn’t be fair if a chance find gave America some kind of accidental edge.

Steve knew his history: when America had an advantage, it used that advantage. The atom bomb against Japan. Logistics and manufacturing against Germany. A superior air force against Iran, Libya and Bosnia. The shock and awe tactics against Iraq. When America fought with one hand tied behind its back, as it had in Vietnam and Korea, it lost. When it used everything it had, when it let the generals decide strategy, America always won.

China was gaining, gaining fast, but America still had the best tanks, the best planes, the best ships. Chinese armed forces claimed technical superiority, but as an engineer Steve knew such claims were a steaming pile of bullshit. Even with the largest manufacturing base in the world and an entire government dedicated to developing a high-tech military, China was still a decade away from being able to fight on equal terms. If war came, America would use everything it had: including alien technology, maybe even that psycho disease President Gutierrez had talked about.

Sure, Gutierrez had warned everyone to be on the lookout for symptoms. Steve remembered the president’s endless “T.E.A.M.S.” public service commercials, the acronym that told the populace to watch for triangles, excessive anger and massive swelling. People knew what to look for, yet the disease had never reappeared — at least as far as the public knew. Did America have it stored away somewhere, like the anthrax or smallpox it also wasn’t supposed to have?

If America possessed a weapon, America would use it.

The only way to keep the balance, to properly protect the land of his ancestors, was to make sure China had the same weapons. If Steve found something his nation could use to defend itself, he would become a legend. In America he could get rich, sure, but he’d always be thought of as nothing more than that smart Asian guy. In China, they would build statues of him.

He would be a national hero.

Bo Pan gagged, then leaned over the rail and threw up again. Steve grabbed a handful of the older man’s coat, just to make sure he didn’t tip over and drop into the water. After a few heaves, Steve pulled Bo Pan back.

The man wiped the back of his mouth with his sleeve. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

Steve wished he could have come alone. Or, if they had to send someone with him, maybe someone better than this useless, seasick messenger.

Noise came from farther back on the deck. Cooper Mitchell and a short Mexican man named José were following Jeff Brockman around the deck. Bo Pan had been agitated that Cooper and Brockman brought another crewmember. Steve couldn’t figure out why — you had to have enough people to run the boat, after all.

José was all of five-foot-five, wiry, with a heavy mop of black hair and a face so happy it looked like he had to concentrate to show anything but a smile. He seemed to look up to Brockman, both literally and figuratively.

Brockman was always first to laugh, first to scowl, first to talk, as if he felt compelled to drive every conversation and every action. He was fun to be around, but Steve suspected that Cooper was the only reason Brockman had a business at all.

The three men checked the straps securing a pair of long, custom-made shipping crates. The bigger of the pair was five feet high and wide, fifteen feet long. Inside lay Steve’s baby, the Platypus. The second crate was smaller, only about four feet long and lower to the deck. It held another of Steve’s creations, one he hoped he wouldn’t have to use.

Bo Pan watched the commotion as well. “How soon can we put your machine in the water?”

Steve’s brain automatically looked for a reason not to do that, checking for something he’d missed, something he’d forgotten, but there was nothing. He was prepared.

“Right now, I suppose,” he said.

Steve watched Brockman and Cooper. He waited for something to happen. After a few minutes, he realized he was waiting for Bo Pan to tell Brockman to get started. But Bo Pan wasn’t in charge.

Steve was.

It was all on him, and him alone. Now he really wished Bo Pan’s handlers had sent someone else. As strange as it felt, Steve was now a real-life spy — the future of his country might actually rely on how well he handled the situation. No pressure, right?

He cupped his hands and shouted. “Hey!” The men looked at him. “Can we get it in the water?”

Brockman looked out at the horizon, as if gauging the wind and the waves, then he glanced at Cooper. Cooper nodded.

Brockman gave Steve a thumbs-up. “We’re on it, boss!”

They started unstrapping the crate.

Steve spoke, and three men jumped into action?

Maybe being in charge would be kind of fun.

LITTLE GREEN MEN

Clarence Otto sat in a chair in front of the captain’s desk, waiting for Captain Gillian Yasaka to arrive. Margaret sat in a chair to his left. She stayed quiet, kept her thoughts to herself. Clarence couldn’t blame her.

The trip from the landing deck to this tidy office had been disturbing, to say the least. The wounded seemed to be countless. Every open space held prone sailors stretched out on tables, on cots, even lying on the floor with nothing more than a thin blanket to give them some padding. Some of the wounded slept. Others moaned, tossed and turned, overwhelmed by hideous burns on hands, arms and faces. Some of these men would be scarred for life.

Margaret had tried to stop a half-dozen times, her years as a medical doctor compelling her to do something, to help those in pain. Clarence had had to keep her moving, gentle steady pushes that reminded her she had to think of the bigger picture — there wasn’t enough time to help any of them, let alone all of them.

The Brashear’s overcrowding made Clarence nervous. People packed that tight would speed the spread of any contagion. One infected person would quickly turn into ten, into a hundred. Maybe that was why Margaret was staying quiet, because she was worried about the same thing.

Yeah, right.

If the woman he’d married was still in there, somewhere, Clarence didn’t know how to find her. He’d tried. He’d tried to understand her, to help her, tried to deal with years of constant crying, constant sadness, the obsessive reading of blog posts and comments. He had tried to stay calm while being her endless punching bag, the target of a rage she couldn’t control. He had tried to be there for her, guide her through all of it.

At what point does a man say I’ve had enough?

Did he have to give up any chance at happiness in exchange for spending his short life watching her wither away? For better or worse looked great under the showroom lights. Once you drove it off the lot, it was a different story.

He couldn’t fight for Margaret if Margaret wouldn’t fight for herself.

She sat in her chair, stared straight ahead. Did she still love him? No, probably not — truth was she hadn’t loved anything for years. She still needed him, absolutely, but the way a crippled man needs a crutch, or the way a drunk needs a bottle. Still, as messed up as she was, Clarence knew that Margaret Montoya was the person for the job. The only person. His love for her had faded, but not his belief; she could figure this out, she could stop it.

He would play his role. He’d make sure she ate, make sure she slept, because she forgot to do both when she lost herself in research. He’d fetch her coffee. He’d clean her clothes. Whatever it took; when the real shit hit the fan, Margaret Montoya took center stage, and Clarence was fine with that.

Captain Yasaka entered. Clarence stood up instantly, faster than he would have liked — leftover reactions from his days in the service. At least he didn’t salute.

Margaret stayed seated.

Captain Yasaka — actual rank of commander, but operating under the honorary title of captain like the commander of every ship in the navy — was as neat and clean as her stateroom. Her graying black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her dark-blue coveralls looked like they had been pressed and then hung on a mannequin protected behind a plateglass window. Her belt buckle was the only thing that outshined her shoes. She stood all of five-six, but Clarence could tell that she had the presence needed to make tall boys quake in their boots if they failed in their duties.

All her meticulous grooming, however, didn’t hide her exhaustion, a certain slackness to her face. Yasaka looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t.

“Doctor Montoya,” she said. She shook hands with Margaret, then Clarence. “Agent Otto.”

Clarence nodded. “Captain.”

Yasaka gestured to Clarence’s chair: sit, relax.

Clarence sat, as did the captain.

“My apologies for making you wait,” she said. “We’re on full alert, and there were things that required my attention.”

Clarence waited for Margaret to speak. It was her show, after all; he was just the wingman. When she said nothing, he spoke for them both.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clarence said. “We understand.”

“I need to make this short,” the captain said. “I have a ship full of wounded, and I have to report about this meeting to Captain Tubberville over on the Pinckney. He’s the task force commander. So I can answer your questions, but please, let’s get to it.”

Margaret nodded. “I need to know what happened,” she said. “The timeline. Timelines are very important.”

Yasaka’s jaw muscles twitched. “Six days ago, at twenty-one-fourteen hours, an ROV from the Los Angeles located an object of interest. The ship commander dispatched a diver to recover that object. The diver wore an ADS 2000, the atmospheric diving suit required for such depths. He disembarked from a dry deck shelter modified for decontamination. The diver recovered the object, then returned to the DDS. While still wearing the ADS, he was sprayed in bleach to kill any possible external contaminant before reentering the ship proper.”

Margaret leaned forward. “The ROV spotted something special? Sending out a diver was unusual?”

“Not at all,” Yasaka said. “In fact, this was the six hundred and fifty-second time a diver from the Los Angeles had performed that task. Every two or three days, on average, the ROV saw something the onboard crew couldn’t identify. Whenever that happened, Captain Banks sent out a diver.”

Clarence wondered if the repetitive, uneventful nature of their job had made the divers sloppy.

Yasaka continued. “At twenty-one-fifty-five hours that same day, the Los Angeles notified us that the object was a significant discovery.”

Margaret looked at Clarence, then at the captain. “So if they thought it was significant, why wasn’t it brought up to the Brashear? I was told this ship has a full BSL-4 research lab.”

Biosafety Level Four… Clarence hated those words. The most stringent safety procedures known to man, used for work with lethal, highly contagious airborne diseases like Marburg and Ebola, shit that could kill millions. BSL-4 suits — the kind Margaret wore to study the alien infection — had positive pressure: if something poked a hole in the suit, air pushed out instead of in, because contact with even a single, microscopic pathogen could mean death.

“My ship’s facilities are fully compliant,” Yasaka said. “We’ve brought up fifteen objects over the last five years. Scraps of Orbital hull, mostly. Bringing potentially contaminated items up from nine hundred feet below is dangerous, Doctor Montoya, and expensive, so the Los Angeles was retrofitted with a small lab of its own. Standard procedure was to make sure an object was not of terrestrial origin before sending it up.”

Margaret looked angry, annoyed. “So they found an alien object and they just held on to it for a few days?”

Yasaka nodded. “If they had found an alien body, or something that was clearly made by little green men, that would have been different. What they found looked like a strange can, so they prepped it and waited until they had enough data to merit the extensive procedures required to send something to the surface.”

Margaret wasn’t the only one getting annoyed; Clarence could see that Yasaka didn’t appreciate Margaret’s intensity. The captain had a ship full of wounded. Her crew had probably recovered hundreds of dead bodies from the Forrest Sherman and the Stratton. This wasn’t the time for Margaret to grill Yasaka about procedure. Clarence’s job of helping Margaret included stepping in when she was about to burn a bridge.

“So it was business as usual,” he said. “You would have probably ordered the object to be brought up, but you didn’t get the chance. What happened next?”

Margaret leaned back in her chair, tried to relax. She’d picked up on Clarence’s cue, knew she needed to back off a little.

Yasaka folded her hands on her desk. “Three days ago, the Los Angeles reported erratic behavior among the crew. A fight involving a few injuries. I’m afraid there wasn’t much detail. Captain Banks made his scheduled daily report, but he seemed… strange. Agitated, but not angry. He didn’t exhibit any of the behaviors associated with the Detroit disease, nor did any of his crew send a message that they suspected he might be infected.”

That surprised Clarence. “I’m sorry, Captain, you’re saying that the crew could contact the Brashear without the captain’s knowledge?”

She nodded. “The navy knows what could be down there, Agent Otto. Procedures were in place that would allow anyone to raise a red flag if something seemed amiss with anyone on the crew, including the captain.”

“But no one raised a flag.”

“No, they didn’t,” Yasaka said. “We now believe that the captain was infected, and he either sabotaged the red-flag system before anyone could use it, or put guards at the various red-flag stations, preventing anyone from calling up. His report about the fight was the last communication we received from the Los Angeles.

“At twelve hundred hours on the day of the battle, we attempted to perform our daily, scheduled communication with the Los Angeles. We received no response. Sonar told us the Los Angeles was just sitting there at eight hundred feet, not moving at all.”

Yasaka paused. She licked her dry lips, then continued. “We were trying to figure out what to do next when the Los Angeles fired on the Forrest Sherman. No warning. At that range, the Sherman had no chance. The Pinckney was the first to respond — Tubberville ordered counterfire, but the Los Angeles managed two more torps before she sank. One hit the Stratton, sinking it, and the other damaged the Truxtun.”

The captain sat back in her chair. She stared off at some invisible thing in her stateroom. “Since then it’s been a nonstop process of recovery and aid.” Her voice was low, haunted. “I’ve got a hold full of dead sailors stacked up like goddamn firewood. We’ve been ordered to burn the bodies — their families don’t even get to say good-bye.”

She shook her head, blinked rapidly, sat up straight. “One of my recovery teams — in full BSL-4 diving gear, before you ask — found the bodies of Lieutenant Walker and Petty Officer Petrovsky and brought them aboard. Those divers are in containment cells for observation and won’t be released unless you give the green light. Walker and Petrovksy are the only two crewmembers recovered from the Los Angeles, which means over a hundred bodies are still on the bottom. I pray to God that we haven’t missed any.”

Clarence wasn’t a religious man, but he’d match that prayer. One severed hand, floating to the surface, escaping detection, bobbing toward shore… if that happened, all the containment efforts could be for naught.

“We’ve sent UUVs down to get eyes on the Los Angeles,” Yasaka said. “They only came close enough to get visual confirmation that she’s destroyed. The Brashear has two ADS suits onboard. Tomorrow, we’re sending a diver down to try to recover the object.”

Clarence’s stomach churned. Margaret already had to autopsy the infected bodies. If Yasaka’s divers succeeded, Margaret would also have to deal with the object that had started this whole slaughterfest.

The captain stood. Clarence rose immediately. Margaret stood as well.

“I have to get back to my crew,” Yasaka said. “Doctor Tim Feely is waiting for you in the research facility, belowdecks.”

“He’s an M.D.?” Margaret asked.

“Degrees in genetics and bioinformatics, actually,” the captain said. “But the man sure as hell knows his medicine. He saved a lot of lives in the battle’s aftermath. He’s a civilian researcher from Special Threats, Doctor Montoya, like you. Hopefully you’ll get along, because you’re going to be here for a while. I’ve been told Walker and Petrovsky — and the object, if we find it — are too risky to ship to the mainland.”

Margaret nodded. “That’s right. Every bit of travel, every exchange, there is a small chance that something will go wrong. A plane crash, a car wreck, a helicopter’s emergency landing… if even the tiniest speck of the pathogen gets out, it could spread too fast to contain.”

Yasaka sighed. “And then we start dropping nukes.”

Clarence saw Margaret look down. Her face flushed. He knew she’d taken that the wrong way, that she thought Yasaka was blaming her for Detroit, blaming her just like the rest of the world blamed her.

“Right,” Margaret said. “If it gets out, we start dropping nukes again.” She looked up, stared back at Captain Yasaka. “It’s been five years. If the disease had the ability to swim away from this location, it would have done so by now. This task force is a floating isolation lab. We have to make sure nothing leaves.”

Yasaka nodded, slowly and grimly. She knew the stakes. Clarence recognized the look in her eyes — Yasaka didn’t think she would ever set foot on land again.

Clarence hoped she was wrong.

If she wasn’t, he and Margaret would die right along with her.

CASA DE FEELY

Margaret thought the lower areas of the Carl Brashear were much like the top floor — or deck, or whatever they called it — a lot of gray paint, a lot of metal, neatly printed warning signs all over the place.

After the meeting with Captain Yasaka, a twentysomething lieutenant had been waiting for her and Clarence. The lieutenant had led them out of Yasaka’s stateroom, past the wounded packed into every available space, and had taken them amidships to a door guarded by two young men with rifles. The men carefully checked her ID, Clarence’s and even the lieutenant’s, someone they clearly already knew.

Very meticulous, very disciplined.

The lieutenant held the door open for them.

“Doctor Feely will take it from here,” he said. “Just go down the stairs.”

Clarence thanked the man. Margaret said nothing. Clarence went down first. Even on a secure ship, he wanted to make sure it was safe for her.

The steep, switchback flights were more ladder than stairs. The same gray walls, but no wounded here because there was nowhere to put them. Margaret found the descent eerily silent.

The last flight opened up to a small room. Gray walls lined three of its sides. A white airlock door made up the fourth. Through a thick window in the middle of the door, Margaret saw a short man reach out and press an unseen button. She heard his voice through speakers mounted on top of the airlock.

“Welcome-welcome-welcome,” he said. “Casa de Feely is happy to have you, Doctor Montoya.”

Feely had thick, blond hair that seemed instantly out of place in a military setting, although judging from the way it stuck up in unkempt bunches he clearly hadn’t washed it in days. Maybe he had a pair of holey sweatpants just like she did. If not, hers would have fit him: they were the same height, although she probably weighed a bit more than he did. His brand of skinny came from lack of sleep and lack of food rather than exercise. The thing that really caught her attention, though, were his eyes — alert but hollow and bloodshot.

She’d seen eyes like that many times, when looking in the mirror after a forty-eight-hour on-call stint from her doctor days, or during the marathon sessions she and Amos had put in when they’d tried to cure the infection.

Clarence rapped his knuckles against the glass.

“You going to let us in?”

“Absolutely,” Feely said. “Just as soon as you take my little prick.”

Clarence scowled. “Excuse me?”

Tim pointed down. “At your feet,” he said. “Cellulose test. Be a pair of dears, won’t you?”

At the base of the door were two small, white boxes, each about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Clarence picked one up and opened it. He looked, then showed the contents to Margaret: sealed alcohol swabs and a metal foil envelope.

She opened the envelope, expecting to see the cheek-swab analysis device she and Amos had invented. Instead, she saw a simple, six-inch plastic tube, white, with three colored LEDs built into it: yellow, green and red.

Margaret held it up. “You don’t use the swab test anymore?”

“You’ve been on vacay for a while, I take it,” Tim said. “Yours was susceptible to false-positives if the test subject had recently eaten plant material. Considering the level of concern in this joint, I didn’t want some guy getting shot because he had a piece of spinach stuck in his teeth. The one you’re holding is a blood test. Spring-loaded needle. Just press it against your fingertip.”

Clarence huffed. “Are you serious? We just got here.”

Tim nodded. “While I may have the natural good looks of a late-night TV host, I assure you I’m serious. I’m negative and I mean to stay that way.”

Smart thinking. Margaret thought of a line she’d read in a book once: perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. She liked Tim already.

Margaret opened an alcohol swab, rubbed down the pad of her thumb, then pressed the tube’s tip against it. She heard a tiny click, felt a sharp poke. She lifted the tube, looked at it: the needle had retracted. A small smear of her blood remained on the unit’s flat end.

The yellow light started to flash. She had a brief, intense flash of fear… what if she’d already caught the disease? What if the light turned red? The yellow flashing slowed. The tiniest mistake could make her change, turn her into a killer, it could—

The green light blinked on.

Margaret let out a long breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She was right back in it again, dead center in the hot zone.

Clarence picked up the second box, repeated Margaret’s actions. In seconds, his test flashed green.

The airlock door slid open with a light hiss of air. The blond man stepped out. He all but ignored Clarence in his rush to offer Margaret an overly excited handshake.

“I’m Tim Feely,” he said. “Biology, mostly, but also regular-old doctorin’ when it’s needed.”

His hands felt soft.

“I’m Margaret Montoya.”

He threw his head back and laughed. A genuine, I don’t care what anybody thinks laugh. In a bar or on a date, this one would be quite the charmer.

“I know who you are,” he said. He turned to Clarence. “As if I don’t know who she is, right?” He turned back to Margaret, his moves twitchy, like a bird’s. “Everyone knows. You’re the woman who saved the world. Thanks for that, by the way.”

He wasn’t being sarcastic — he meant it, said it with real admiration. On the Internet and the news talk shows, no one thanked her. But this man had.

Tim bowed with a flourish, gestured toward the airlock. “Come one, come all, to the midnight ball. Fuck am I glad to have some help down here.”

“Thank you,” Margaret said. “That’s quite a welcome.”

“I try, I try,” Tim said. He tilted his head toward Clarence. “Who’s the stiff?”

Margaret noticed that Tim was trying — and failing — not to stare at her breasts.

“Agent Clarence Otto,” she said. “My husband.”

Tim looked Clarence up and down, and not in the same way he’d scoped out Margaret.

“Nice suit,” Tim said. “Not many suits in lab work. I don’t suppose you can do anything down here that’s actually helpful?”

“You never know,” Clarence said. “Sometimes shooting people is a useful skill.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Oh, great, an action hero. That will come in handy among all the dead bodies. Come on in. Let me give you the tour. After you, m’lady.”

She stepped into the airlock, faced an interior door. Clarence and Tim followed. Margaret glanced around, saw drains in the floor and the familiar nozzles and vents — the airlock doubled as a decontamination chamber.

“The lab complex has a slightly negative internal pressure,” Tim said as he shut the exterior door and cycled the airlock. “Anything punches a hole in the wall, outside air comes in, any cooties we might have don’t go out. Plus when you need that extra-clean feeling, this baby gives you a little chlorine, a little sodium, a little oxygen… all the things a growing boy needs.”

Clarence’s nose wrinkled in a look of confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Bleach,” Margaret said. “The nozzles spray bleach.”

Clarence looked annoyed. Maybe he felt dumb for not getting Tim’s reference. Clarence hated to feel dumb.

The internal door opened. After so much battleship gray, Margaret was surprised to see white walls and floors. Framed prints added color, as did potted plants.

“This is the living section,” Tim said. “All the comforts of home while floating on an inland sea.”

The place looked like the lobby of a small, posh hotel: couches, chairs, a table with a chess set ready for play, a huge, flat-panel monitor up on the wall. Soft overhead lighting made things look, well, cozy. It didn’t feel like being on a military ship at all.

The decor seemed to bother Clarence. “Nice,” he said. “Good thing you don’t have to put up with the same conditions as the enlisted men who are taking care of you.”

Tim nodded, missing the dig. “Tell me about it, brother,” he said. “This place makes the time somewhat passable.”

He walked to a picture mounted on a wall. It was an emergency escape diagram, a long, vertical rectangle broken into three squares. The top was labeled Living Quarters, the middle Lab Space, and the bottom one Receiving & Containment.

Margaret noticed that all escape routes led back to the airlock they’d just exited. Just one way in, and one way out.

Tim pointed to the top square.

“That’s where we are now,” he said. “Living Quarters consists of ten small bedrooms, communal bathrooms, the room we’re standing in — I call it the Rumpus Room, by the way, because who doesn’t want to have a Rumpus Room — a kitchen with our own food supply, and a briefing room that doubles as a whoop-ass movie theater.”

He pointed to a green icon on the right side, on top of a line that divided the Living Quarters from the Lab Space below it. The Lab Space square contained three long, vertical rectangles. Margaret recognized the symbols: research trailers, ready-made modules that could be hauled by a semi or shipped as cargo. She felt a shudder — the trailers were probably similar to the MargoMobile where her friend Amos Braun had died a horrible death at the skinless hands of Betty Jewel. The rectangle on the left was labeled Morgue, the one in the middle Analysis, and the one on the right Misc.

Tim tapped the green icon. “This is the second airlock, the one that leads to the lab section, another step down in negative pressure. Keep them pathogens where they belong, my grandmother always used to say. Suits are in that airlock.” He turned to Clarence, smiled. “Real suits, my friend, the kind that matter.”

Clarence ignored the gibe.

Tim turned back to the map, traced his finger down through still another green icon. “This airlock leads from the lab space to the Receiving and Containment section. That’s where they brought in any material recovered by the Los Angeles. It’s a cool setup, you’ll dig it. It’s also where we keep any living subjects, which includes the two navy divers who retrieved the bodies of Walker and Petrovsky.”

He rubbed his hands together. “So, y’all ready to get to work, or do you want to take a little nap before we go in? Maybe powder your noses? I have a little single malt in the theater, if you want to wet your whistles.”

“No,” Margaret said quickly. “I don’t need a drink. The bodies, are they affected by the black rot?”

That was the thing that made it so difficult to work on infection victims. The crawlers set off a chain reaction that caused cell death on a massive level. An unrefrigerated body could decompose in just thirty-six hours, becoming little more than a mass of sludge that sloughed off the skeleton.

Tim shrugged. “Walker’s body is okay, but Petrovsky is already showing signs of liquefaction. By tomorrow I think he’ll be blood pudding.”

Like always, a ticking clock held sway over everything.

Margaret nodded. “Then let’s get to work.”

FAKE FUR

“What the fuck is that thing?”

Jeff Brockman had such a way with words, although Cooper had to agree with the sentiment.

The Mary Ellen Moffett’s deck lights lit up Steve Stanton’s strange machine. The lights wouldn’t be needed for long: the sun was only minutes from sliding up on the horizon, its glow already turning the low-hanging clouds a pinkish-orange. Five-foot swells continued to rock the boat, but at least the wind had finally died down. When the sun did rise, Cooper hoped the temperature might climb into the double digits.

Breath frosting from their mouths, Cooper, Jeff, José, Steve and Steve’s buddy Bo Pan stood in a loose circle, staring down at the cargo they’d hauled out to the middle of Lake Michigan.

When Steve Stanton had spoken of his ROV, Cooper assumed he knew what to expect: a boxy metal frame, about six feet wide and tall, maybe ten feet long, yellow ballast tanks on top, a couple of turbines in the back and a pair of robotic arms in the front. Throw in a camera suite and a long-ass cable, and you were in business.

But this?

For starters, it wasn’t yellow. It was covered in elephant-gray material studded with little points, kind of like acoustic foam. Ten feet long, sure, but there was nothing boxy about this contraption. The ROV’s front end came to a streamlined point. From there, it flared wide with the outline of a fish before tapering down again to a pair of flippers in the rear, like those of a Cape fur seal. On each side was a wide fin, like that of a penguin.

Jeff stared down at it. He crossed his arms, frowned.

“It’s fuzzy,” he said. He looked at Stanton. “You made an ROV with fur?”

“It’s an antiturbulence material,” Steve said. “Helps adjust the water flow for greater speed. Once it gets wet it looks very different.”

Cooper reached down and gently poked one of the furry points with a finger — felt like a stiff foam.

Steve shot out a panicked hand. “Please don’t touch!”

Cooper stood, held up both hands, palms out. “Wow, sorry.”

The kid blinked, looked around, saw that everyone was staring at him. He forced a smile.

“The material is just delicate is all,” he said. “My bad, I should have asked everyone not to touch it earlier.”

Cooper felt Jeff glaring at him. Jeff had that suspicious expression on his face again — the ROV was beyond state of the art, something altogether new, and that bothered him. Jeff subtly held up his hand, thumb rubbing against his fingertips: that thing looks like big money.

Cooper nodded. Of course Steve had money; he was part of some lawyer’s class-action lawsuit. Millions of dollars on the line. Cooper felt bad for the people who now ran Delta Airlines; this was going to wind up being one high-toned bitch of a lawsuit.

José craned his head around, looked at the ROV from all sides.

“Hey, Jefe Steve,” he said. “Where do you connect the control cable?” José insisted on calling everyone jefe, Spanish for boss. He looked around the deck, as if he suddenly realized he was missing something. “And where is the cable? Is that in the other box?”

He started toward the smaller of Steve’s two boxes, the one still strapped to the deck.

“Please don’t touch that one, either,” Steve said. Again, the words were rushed, nearly panicky.

Jeff glared. Cooper felt uncomfortable — the customer was acting very strange.

Steve shook his head, forced another smile. “There isn’t a cable. The Platypus is remote controlled to some extent, but mostly autonomous.”

Autonomous? An unmanned underwater vehicle; a robot. Cooper winced: that meant it cost exponentially more. He looked at Jeff, who was already shaking his head, lips pressed together in held-back anger.

“You told us you had an ROV,” Jeff said. “Now you’re telling us this is a UUV?”

Steve’s eyes widened. He glanced over to Bo Pan, just for the briefest second, but Bo Pan kept staring at the deck.

Cooper was losing his patience. Jeff could still blow this job if he kept being difficult.

“Jeff, it’s all good,” Cooper said. “UUV, ROV, ABC, whatever, let’s just get it in the water, okay?”

Jeff looked at Cooper, looked at the machine. He nodded.

“Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. Then, his booming I’m the boss voice returned. “Cooper, man the crane. José, get ready to get wet. Mister Stanton, if you’ll point out the right way for us to hook up your machine so we don’t break it, we’ll get her in the drink and you can do your thing.”

Everyone moved into action. Everyone except for Bo Pan. As Cooper headed to the Mary Ellen’s crane, he noticed Bo Pan watching Jeff, then watching José. Then, his eyes locked with Cooper’s.

For just a moment, Bo Pan didn’t look like the old man who had come aboard. His eyes were hard, cold… dangerous. Then the expression vanished — he looked out to the water, hawked a huge loogie and spat it over the side.

Just some old dude along for the ride. Right?

Cooper felt a shiver that wasn’t from the cold. He shook off the sensation, then got to work.

KILLER MATH FOR $200

Testing units weren’t the only thing that had changed in the last five years.

Margaret stood in the second airlock with Tim and Clarence. The three of them wore BSL-4 suits.

At first, the suit had seemed familiar. Like those she’d worn before, it was made of airtight Tyvek, a synthetic material. A heavy-gauge seal secured the oversized helmet onto the suit, and the helmet itself had a tall, wide, clear, curved visor that gave her full range of vision.

The visor itself, however, was something out of a movie.

“This is crazy,” she said. “So much information.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Tim said. “Before you know it, it’ll be second nature.”

She looked at him. She could see him through her visor, but her eyes also tried to register the information playing on the inside of it — the visor was a full-on heads-up display, scrolling data about the airlock and a medical report about the two divers in observation. She was wearing a computer screen in front of her face.

“My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”

“Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”

She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”

Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”

How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got harassed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with shit like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.

“Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”

“Like I could miss it,” Tim said. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”

He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a ship.

On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.

Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical analysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.

“Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”

He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”

Three trailers, each capable of comfortably supporting four or five people working simultaneously, and yet Tim was the only one here. And along the same lines, the facility had ten bedrooms — nine of which had been empty before Margaret and Clarence had arrived.

“Doctor Feely,” she said, “where is the rest of the staff?”

Tim flung his gloved hands up in annoyance. “They’re all pursuing their disciplines at other facilities or at the research base on Black Manitou Island. When they first brought me in, I was part of a ten-person staff. Year after year, as the navy didn’t find anything significant, the rest of the staff found ways to conduct their research off the ship. But believe it or not, one guy can do the majority of the grunt work down here. Most of the equipment is automated, and all of it is the best money can buy.”

“You’re still here,” she said to Tim. “Why aren’t you on Black Manitou?”

His bloodshot eyes narrowed. He looked at the wall. “I worked there a few years ago when it was a civilian biotech facility, before DST took it over. I’m not allowed to talk about what we were working on, other than that it involved technologies for rapid growth. There were some… accidents.” He gave his head a little shake. “Anyway, I don’t ever want to go back. It’s safer here.”

Safer here, on a task force dedicated to working with a vector that had the potential to wipe out the human race. Margaret wondered just what kind of accidents Tim was talking about. Whatever the reason, he had chosen to stay down here, mostly alone. He was a shut-in, just like she was.

“What have you worked on all that time?”

“Lots of stuff,” Tim said. “My tan, mostly. Oh, and trying to engineer a new strain of yeast, Saccharomyces feely, to secrete the infection’s self-destruct catalyst so we’d have a weapon if the disease ever struck again.”

“Saccharomyces feely,” Margaret said. “Naming it after yourself?”

Tim grinned. “Don’t hate the player, girl… hate the game.”

This one was quite full of himself.

Regardless of what he named the strain, it was a worthwhile pursuit. When a victim died, the infection triggered two chemical chain reactions that combined to leave scientists with nothing to study.

The first reaction: uncontrolled apoptosis. Apoptosis was the normal process of cell destruction. When a cell has damage to the DNA or other areas, that cell, in effect, commits suicide, removing itself from the organism. The infection modified that process so it didn’t shut off — a cell swelled and burst, spreading the chain reaction to the cells around it, which then swelled and burst, and so on. Within a day or two, a corpse became little more than black sludge dripping off a skeleton.

The second chain reaction had the same effect on the infection’s cellulose structures. Instead of apoptosis, infection’s cells produced a cellulase. Cellulase dissolved cellulose, the cell swelled and burst, spreading the cellulase catalyst to surrounding cells, and so on.

The Orbital had hijacked human systems; Tim was trying to turn the tables and do the same to the Orbital’s creations.

“Speaking of grunts,” Clarence said, appearing to refer to Tim’s comment about grunt work but intending it as a slap-back at Margaret’s insult, “What does Saccharomyces mean?”

“Yeast,” Margaret said. She felt her face heat with shame. No matter how bad she and Clarence fought, there was no valid excuse to insinuate he wasn’t smart, that his work didn’t matter. When she was fully rational, she knew that. Problem was, that man made her irrational far more often than she cared to admit.

She tried to shake it off, turned to face Tim. “Yeast, that’s smart. Modify their germline DNA so that subsequent generations produce that cellulase catalyst, and you’ve got an endless supply of something that kills the infection. Any luck?”

Tim shook his head. “Close, but no cigar. I was able to get the yeast to produce the catalyst, but that catalyst is toxic to the yeast as well. The engineered yeast die before they can reproduce, so we don’t even get a second generation, let alone the massive colonies needed to secrete the amount of catalyst we’d need.”

Clarence fidgeted in his bulky suit, pulling at the blue material, trying to make it settle on him better.

“So, Doctor Feely, it’s just you down here,” he said. “Captain Yasaka mentioned you also helped with the wounded. How much sleep have you had?”

Tim frowned, made a show of counting on his gloved fingers. “Let’s see, carry the one, divide by four, and… Alex, the question is, what is zero?”

That didn’t surprise Margaret, not with the number of wounded up above.

“No sleep,” Clarence said. “You on drugs or something?”

“If by drugs you mean Adderall, Deprenyl and/or Sudafed — mostly and, though — then yes, I am on drugs.”

Margaret saw Clarence taking a deep, disapproving breath. She put her gloved hand on his arm.

“Clarence, relax,” she said. “Any doctor pulling a triple shift might do the same.”

He turned to her, disbelieving. “Have you?”

“More times than I can count. I had a life before I met you, you know. And apparently a life after.”

If he wanted to make snide comments, she could do the same. The words caught him off guard, stung him. They also piqued Tim’s interest. Margaret wanted to kick herself for the slipup, for exposing personal problems at a time like this. She had to stay on point.

Tim grinned at Margaret. “Come on, it’s the scheduled time to give my little prick to the two divers. After that, we can touch bodies. Dead bodies, that is.”

Clarence sighed again, and Margaret couldn’t blame him.

GOD’S CHOSEN

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy had always dreamed of serving in the navy. The big ships, seeing the world on Uncle Sam’s dime, the service, the career — he had wanted all these things.

He hadn’t wanted to murder people, though.

Until now.

Now, he wanted to murder a lot of people. Ever single person he saw, in fact.

The biosafety suit made him sweat. It also bounced his own voice back to him when he talked, made him sound strange.

“Lattimer, John J.,” he called out, reading from the list on the clipboard as he’d been instructed to do. “Cellulose test.”

Four wounded men were lying on the floor in the corner of the bunk room. They were too wounded to do work, but less wounded than the men who occupied the actual bunks. Second-degree burns covered one man’s arm. Another sailor had a red-spotted bandage wrapped around his head, something straight out of a shitty war movie.

Orin wanted to shoot them. Stab them. Maybe stomp down on their throats and watch them suffocate to death. But for now, he had to keep up appearances.

“Lattimer, John J.,” he said again. “Which one of you is Lattimer, John J.?”

The one with the head bandage raised his hand.

Orin pulled a cellulose testing kit out of the bag slung over his shoulder, handed it over. Orin knew he wasn’t human anymore, but he could still appreciate the irony that he was one of the sailors testing people to see if they were infected.

His turn was coming soon enough. He’d managed to dodge his last test, when he’d already realized God had chosen him. Orin had pretended to fall, jabbed the end of his testing stick into a sleeping man. It worked: his test administrator had been distracted, had been counting down names on the list, looking for the next testee. If it had been business as usual aboard the Brashear, the administrator would have been eyes-on, carefully watching the results. But it wasn’t business as usual; God had seen to it to place hundreds of extra men onboard, many severely wounded, creating confusion, making people lose focus.

Still, Orin knew that he probably wouldn’t be able to fake his way through the next test. They, the humans, they would find out about him, and they would try to kill him. That test was scheduled in two hours.

In thirty minutes, his shift in the suit was up.

That would give him ninety minutes to touch as many people as he could, to spread the gift that he’d been given.

Then, maybe, he could answer that burning, churning need in his chest.

He could finally kill.

TESTY-TESTY

The final airlock cycled. Clarence stepped out first, took in a large area hemmed in by the now-familiar white walls. In front of him were two rows of high-ceilinged, ten-by-ten glass cells stretching to the back of the room.

A man stood in each of the two closest cells: a black man on the left, a white man on the right, both wearing gray hospital gowns. They were just there to be observed, but that didn’t make it any less of a prison. Both men seemed fit and healthy, arms lined with lean muscle.

Each cell had a small steel desk, a steel chair beneath it, and a plastic-covered mattress that lay on top of a stainless steel bed. A tablet computer sat on each desk — the divers’ entertainment and reading material, perhaps. Other than that there was nothing, save for a steel toilet that looked to be a raised hole without plumbing.

In a third cell, behind that of the white man, Clarence saw an Asian man lying motionless on the bed. Medical equipment surrounded him, a technological monster clutching at him with wires and sensors, looking inside him through tubes up his nose and IVs in his arms.

Through their clear cell walls, the two standing men watched Clarence, Margaret and Tim. The men looked afraid. They watched. They waited.

To Clarence’s right, past the line of glass cages, was an open space ringed with gleaming steel tables, clamps, saws, robotic arms… various equipment to prepare material brought up from the lake bottom, he assumed. The reason for the prep area was clear: to receive material from yet another airlock, this one the biggest he had ever seen. It was the width of a two-car garage. Nozzles and vents lined the ceiling; everything in this room here could be sprayed down, disinfected in a rainstorm of bleach.

Margaret walked to the aisle that ran between the two rows of cells. The cell doors opened onto that aisle — if they would ever be opened, that was. Clarence knew those men might very well die in those cells. A flat-panel monitor was mounted at the left side of each cell door. On those monitors, Clarence saw the familiar spikes of an EKG, various other numbers revealing the physical state of the men inside.

How much did these men know? Did they truly understand why they were being held?

“They look okay,” Clarence said.

“They do,” Tim said. “They’re tested every three hours, all negatives so far. The rest of the ship is tested every six hours. Including me. And, now, both of you.”

He pointed to the cell with the prone man. “That fellow, on the other hand, is unfortunately brain-dead. Ensign Eric Edmund. Couldn’t exactly call him okay.”

Margaret stepped into the aisle between cells. “Was Edmund also a diver?”

“No,” Tim said. “Injured in the battle. He’s a gift from Captain Yasaka, in case I need a living subject for my yeast experimentation.”

Clarence felt his anger flare up. He spun to face Tim.

“Experiment? Brain-dead or not, that’s a serviceman in there, not a gift.”

Tim didn’t bother to hide a look of contempt. “Agent Otto, Ensign Edmund isn’t coming back. If he wasn’t in that cell, he’d have already been put in the incinerator along with the other dead bodies. Machines are the only thing keeping him alive.”

“Alive for your research,” Clarence said. “Which you already told us was a failure.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “How about you use that oversized melon of yours for something other than a hat rack? We have no idea what we’ll need. If we have to experiment, it’s Edmund or some other sailor, maybe one who’s not brain-dead.”

“What’s the matter, Feely? Don’t have the balls to experiment on yourself?”

Feely shrugged. “I didn’t enlist, big fella. If you’re dumb enough to sign your life over to Uncle Sam, then Uncle Sam gets to decide what happens to you.”

Clarence moved closer, stared down at the smaller man. “I was dumb enough to enlist, you asshole.”

He’d assumed his size would intimidate Feely, that his position with the DST might make Tim rethink his opinion of servicemen — but Tim just smiled an arrogant smile.

“You were a soldier? And here I was thinking you had a particle physics degree in your pants — maybe you’re just glad to see me.”

“Enough,” Margaret said, her words loud enough to rattle the speakers in Clarence’s helmet. He turned, looked at her, and felt instantly foolish — this was no time to let someone like Feely get a rise out of him.

Margaret glared at them both. “If you two want to have a pissing contest, save it for later. Doctor Feely, if it weren’t for Agent Otto, you wouldn’t be here. I didn’t save the world all by myself, you know. Give him the respect he deserves.”

Clarence had a brief moment to feel justified, to feel that Margaret was backing him up, before she turned her anger on him.

“And you, Clarence, wake up — before this is over, we might have to do far worse things than experiment on a man who’s already gone. Now, if the two of you are done posturing, can we get to work?”

Clarence’s anger shifted instantly into embarrassment. He nodded.

“Sorry,” Tim said. “From now on, I’ll be sugar and spice and everything nice.”

Feely was still being a smart-ass, but Clarence thought he heard a hint of sincerity in there.

Margaret reached out, tapped at the left-hand cell’s panel. “They’ve been in here for” — she tapped again — “thirty-eight hours.”

“Correct,” Tim said. “Your notes described an incubation period of between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before infected victims start to show symptoms. So if we’re lucky, these men are in there another two days, just to be sure.”

The black diver spoke. “I find your definition of luck somewhat wanting, Doctor Feely.”

The white diver rested his forehead against the inside of his cell wall. “Oh, man… two more days?”

Tim walked back to the airlock door and opened a cabinet mounted just to its left. He pulled out two cellulose test boxes, then returned to the black diver’s cell.

“Master Diver Kevin Cantrell, meet Doctor Montoya and Agent Otto,” Tim said. “How about you show them our fun little drama called it puts the lotion in the basket.”

Tim placed the box in a small, rotating airlock mounted in the clear door, then moved his hands in midair. It took Clarence a second to remember Tim was using his suit’s HUD to control things. The airlock turned. Cantrell opened the white box, pulled out the foil envelope inside.

He stared at it like it was a living thing, something pretending to be still until it was ready to bite.

“Your title is wrong,” Cantrell said. “I prefer The Merchant of Venice.”

“Venice,” Tim said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Margaret answered. “It’s Shakespeare — If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

Cantrell glanced at her, then at the testing unit, then looked at her again, stared hard.

“Lady, are you… are you here to kill me?”

A direct question, but it didn’t make sense. Clarence noticed a slight gleam on Cantrell’s forehead. He was perspiring a little… did he have a fever?

Margaret answered in a calm, measured voice. “Mister Cantrell, why do you think I want to kill you?”

Clarence understood: she thought Cantrell might be showing signs of paranoia, one of the main symptoms of infection.

Cantrell blinked rapidly, sniffed. He forced a smile, gestured to the walls around him.

“I’m a guinea pig, ma’am,” he said. “It’s a logical question.”

Before Margaret could ask another question, Cantrell removed the white plastic tube, pressed it against the tip of his right pointer finger. The yellow light started flashing immediately.

Clarence watched, tension pulling his body forward, making his hand itch to draw his weapon — a weapon he didn’t have. He felt naked. He needed to get a rig that would let him wear a holster over the suit. Was Cantrell’s light about to turn red? Was a piece of thick glass all that separated Margaret from one of the infected?

The flashing yellow slowed, then stopped and blinked out.

The green light turned on.

Clarence’s body relaxed slightly, a tight spring uncoiling halfway. Maybe these guys still had a chance.

Cantrell carried his test — box and envelope and all — to his toilet. He tossed everything down the open hole. Clarence heard a soft whump: an incinerator flaring to life.

The other diver slapped on the glass of his cell, making Margaret jump.

“Ma’am, you got to get me out of here,” he said to her. “We’re fine, the tests keep coming up negative, we’re fine.”

It took Tim only two steps to cross the aisle. He put the other box in the airlock, rotated it through.

“And this fine gentleman is Diego Clark,” Tim said. “Clark, how about you quit with the whining and make with the pricking?”

Clark looked at the test box like it was poisonous. He then looked up at the cluster of nozzles mounted in his cell’s high ceiling. Some of the nozzles were stainless steel, others were brass. The brass nozzles reminded Clarence of something, but he couldn’t place what. The stainless steel ones he recognized, as he’d seen them in the MargoMobile — they were for knockout gas, in case Tim and Margaret had to go in and work on a dangerous infection victim.

Clark slapped the glass again. “Let me out! We were just doing our jobs, we shouldn’t be locked up! This is horseshit! Where’s my CO? Where’s my lawyer?”

“Less talky-talky,” Tim said, “more testy-testy.”

Clark opened the box and removed the foil envelope, then threw the box down and stomped on it.

“When I get out of here, Feely,” he said, “I’m going to shove one of these straight up your ass.”

“As long as you buy me dinner first,” Tim said. “Now do the damn test.”

Clark again looked up to the ceiling, then shook his head.

“Ain’t gonna burn me,” he said.

Burn. That triggered Clarence’s memory. He again looked up at the cell ceiling, and understood why the brass nozzle seemed familiar: it looked like a flamethrower. Clark was right to be afraid — his cage could be instantly turned into a fire-filled oven that would burn him alive.

Tim sighed, clearly bored with the drama. He slowly raised a finger toward the flat-panel controls of Clark’s cell.

“You’re getting tested,” Tim said. “You can either be conscious for it, or I can knock you out and give it to you myself. Your choice.”

Clark instantly shook his head. Whatever Tim used as knockout gas, it clearly had unpleasant side effects. Clark tore the foil envelope open, took the time to use the alcohol swab — which Cantrell hadn’t bothered with, Clarence realized — then stabbed the end into his finger.

The yellow light flashed faster, then slowed.

Then, stopped.

The red light came on.

No one said a word. Clarence stared, stunned into thoughtlessness. The man had looked fine.

Cantrell broke the silence. “ ‘If you poison us,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘do we not die?’ ”

Clark raised the testing kit to eye level, his wide stare locked on the steady, red light.

Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “No… we won.”

Tim finally reacted. He moved his hands in front of his face, accessing something on his HUD.

“Clark, Diego L., tested positive for cellulose,” he said. “Administering anesthesia.”

He tapped the empty air. Something up above beeped. Clark looked up, eyes wide, body shaking.

“Don’t light me up, man,” he said, “don’t… light…”

He sagged to the floor. He didn’t move.

RUNNING DRUGS

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

José spoke quietly, but Cooper heard the words loud and clear. He tried to ignore them. He was sleeping, after all.

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

Cooper lifted his head, opened his eyes. Smiling José was kneeling next to the bed. He was close, almost leaning over Cooper, but the tiny half-stateroom didn’t leave much of an option; it was already too cramped for just one person, let alone a second.

José offered a steaming cup of coffee. “Ah, you’re awake,” he said, as if it was a lucky coincidence.

“I am now,” Cooper said. “And I don’t want to be. I haven’t slept all night, man. Is everything okay?”

José shrugged. “Probably. But… can I show you something?”

Cooper flopped his face back into the pillow. “Does it involve me getting up?”

José laughed, but it seemed forced. “Why, is there something of mine you want to see while you’re lying in bed?”

“Good point. Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”

“I am,” José said. “But I think this is really important.”

Cooper sat up quickly. “Is Jeff…”

His voice trailed off. He was about to ask if Jeff had the helm, but the loud snoring from the other side of a thin wall told him Jeff was out cold. When they’d bought the Mary Ellen, Jeff had built a wall dividing the ten-by-ten captain’s stateroom into two equal five-by-ten rooms. He’d put in another door, even installed a second sink so they would each have one. Partners, fifty-fifty all the way, as they’d been since childhood. While it gave Cooper the luxury of a small amount of privacy, it also meant he heard everything that went on in Jeff’s stateroom. What Jeff did more than anything else in there was snore. Loudly.

Cooper took the cup of coffee. “You left the bridge unattended. This better be fucking important, dude.”

José nodded quickly, placatingly. “Yes, Jefe Cooper, I know. Maybe it’s nothing. Come up to the bridge, okay? And… and don’t wake up Jefe Jeff, yet, okay?”

“Why?”

José shrugged. “I need the money from this job. If I don’t get it, my family will get kicked out of our house.”

That meant the problem had something to do with Stanton. Jeff seemed one more incident away from insisting on turning back, killing the contract and dumping Stanton and Bo Pan back on shore. José needed the money — so did Cooper, so did Jeff.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “But you do know how ridiculous Jefe Jeff sounds, right?”

José smiled, shrugged. He slid out of the stateroom and into the corridor.

Cooper took a sip of the coffee, set the mug on his half-desk. He stood, slid his feet into his shoes. He was already dressed — in bad weather, you had to be ready to move quick.

He left the stateroom, stopped in front of his best friend’s door. It felt wrong to not wake Jeff up, involve him in this, but Jeff just wasn’t thinking clearly. Cooper would handle it. If it turned out to be anything important, he’d wake Jeff right away.

Cooper headed up. José was waiting for him on the Mary Ellen’s small bridge. Cooper stepped inside, shut the door behind him. The bridge had only a little more room than his stateroom; on the Mary Ellen, everything was nice and cozy.

“Okay, what’s this about?”

“Jefe Stanton’s robot ship,” José said. “Something you need to see from when it launched.”

He turned to the sonar unit and started to call up a recording.

“You woke me up to show me sonar of the customer’s ROV?”

“UUV,” José corrected.

“Right, UUV, whatever.”

Jose finished loading the recording. He played it. Cooper leaned in to look at the sonar readout, and as he did, he grew angry.

The Platypus was ten feet long, not quite two feet wide at its widest point, a long, thick eel of a machine with flippers at the end and the sides. It was artificial — metal and carbon fiber, materials that bounced back sonar loud and strong. The image on the sonar recording didn’t look artificial at all.

“Goddamit, José, that’s a sonar signature from a fucking fish. This is what I get for letting an illegal Filipino play with expensive equipment.”

“Putang ina mo,” José said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you have pretty eyes, Jefe Cooper.”

“I’m quite certain that’s not what it means,” Cooper said. “Just because you don’t know how to work the equipment doesn’t mean you can insult me.”

“And calling me an illegal isn’t an insult? I’m an undocumented worker.”

José paused the playback. His finger reached out, rested below the screen’s time readout. Cooper saw it, made the connection — the recording was from the time of that morning’s launch.

Cooper leaned in. “What the hell?”

“This is when the Platypus was right next to the boat,” Jose said. “Watch as it starts to move away…”

He hit “play.” The sonar signal faded, then vanished. Cooper looked at the time readout: only ten seconds had passed.

“That can’t be right,” he said. “Ten seconds after it started moving, it wasn’t even thirty feet away from us.”

At a distance of thirty feet, something artificial the size of the Platypus should have been a bright white signal.

José paused the playback. He looked at Cooper. For once, the man wasn’t smiling.

“That’s not just expensive equipment, Jefe Cooper. That’s stealth. Military-grade, maybe. Is Stanton running drugs or something? What if the Coast Guard comes out here?”

Cooper finally understood José’s concern.

“Steve Stanton is not running drugs,” Cooper said. “We won’t get busted by the Coasties. You won’t get deported. You’re fine.”

José looked at the paused recording. He hit “play” and again let it run. It showed nothing. He looked up at Cooper again.

“And no gang war? No one will shoot at us?”

“No gang war,” Cooper said. “We’re safe. I promise. Just…” Cooper couldn’t help looking at the screen again, noting that the time stamp was thirty seconds into the Platypus launch — the thing should have still been kicking back sonar like mad. “You were right to tell only me. Jeff will just get all fired up, and it’s nothing. Between us, right?”

José nodded, raised his hands in a gesture that said, You told me what I needed to hear.

“Okay, Jefe Cooper. Sorry to wake you up.” He stood and walked to the door.

“No problem,” Cooper said. “You go on, get some sleep. I’ve got the helm.”

José left.

Cooper sat, feeling mixed emotions.

Stealth. Military-grade.

If Jeff found out…

Cooper shook his head. Jeff wouldn’t find out. So the customer had expensive equipment, crazy expensive, so what? That wasn’t Cooper’s business, and it wasn’t Jeff’s business, either. They were getting paid like kings to facilitate Steve Stanton’s search for the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes.

Jeff’s instincts and decisions had almost put the business under. It was Cooper’s turn to call the shots. A few more days, a week at the most, and this would be over.

THE BODIES

“Margo,” Clarence said, “you okay?”

Margaret heard his voice through the speakers in her wide helmet, but also from outside the suit. Clarence was right behind her, in a BSL-4 rig of his own.

She’d tuned out, got lost in her memories. Amos… Dew… Betty Jewell… Chelsea… Perry. The mind-ripping horror of it all. No, she wasn’t okay. Not even close.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

She hadn’t been on the Carl Brashear for more than a few hours, and there was already one person infected. The divers had done something wrong, exposed themselves somehow.

Margaret was already far behind in the race.

To center herself, she took a long look at the trailer Tim called the hurt locker. The place had been designed with volume in mind. Ten metal tables were lined up in parallel, running down the trailer’s length. Each table had its own rack of analysis equipment. Maybe the engineers assumed the Carl Brashear would have a full complement of scientists when the shit hit the fan.

She reached up, checked the hose connected to her helmet: secure, no problems. When moving from trailer to trailer, the suits used internal air supplies. For working in one area, however, ceiling-mounted hoses provided breathable air.

Two of the metal tables held corpses of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky. Tim was already working on Petrovsky, taking samples from all over his body.

Margaret couldn’t put it off any longer: she had to get to work, figure out what had happened. One of those bodies — or both — had infected Diego Clark.

“Clarence, I need you to talk to Cantrell,” she said. “Clark’s diving gear was BSL-4 rated. We have to figure out how he got infected.”

“I can do that,” Clarence said. “I’ve read his report, seems like everything was solid.”

She’d also read the report, hadn’t seen any mistakes. “Maybe he missed something. Maybe the suits malfunctioned, somehow.”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. “I’ll find out. Do you need anything before I go talk to him?”

She shook her head. From her helmet’s speakers, she could hear him breathing. He was there with her, like he always was, like he had been since he’d been assigned to her when all of this began nearly six years earlier. What would life be like without him? And how had she managed to let a man like him slip away?

Margaret had to get her head in the game. She couldn’t rely on Clarence to be her crutch anymore.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just go, Clarence. Talk to Cantrell.”

She walked toward the bodies.

Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made bumpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.

The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.

Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.

Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.

Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.

Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.

Amos… his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery… Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her bloody hand slid free…

“Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”

Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”

Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing. Half a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.

“You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”

“Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”

Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.

“Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”

“Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”

AWAKENING

Motion.

Vibrations from a bone saw, the regular probing of fingers and hands, these things resonated through the body.

These vibrations, these movements, triggered an ingrained, automatic response inside the cyst-encased neutrophils. They turned on. They secreted a new chemical, one that dissolved the shells protecting them against the forces of decomposition.

Newly exposed to the apoptosis chemicals, the neutrophils didn’t have much time. Some of them didn’t make it: caught in blobs of caustic rot, they died almost immediately. Others pushed up, pushed out, crawling through Charlie’s muscle, through his subcutaneous layer, through his dermis, then his epidermis and finally gathered just beneath the squamous epithelium — the skin’s outermost layer.

There they would wait, wait until they felt the pressure of another surface coming into contact.

When that happened, the neutrophils would cling to that new surface.

Then they would simply follow their programming, and do what they were made to do.

THE FULL RIDE

Clarence hated the suit. It made him feel clumsy, awkward. He’d strapped a holster to the outside of his thigh, but if things went south he wasn’t even sure if his gloved fingers could fit through his weapon’s trigger guard. Far more significant, though, was the fact that he might be just one tiny rip away from suffering the same fate as Diego Clark.

He hated the suit, true, but the heads-up display thing was amazing. He had Cantrell’s service record right in front of him, at the left edge of his vision. All he had to do was turn his head and read.

Clarence exited the airlock and walked to Clark’s cell. He stood in front of the clear door, staring in.

The mattress had been removed. Incinerated, probably. Clark lay on his back on the bed’s metal surface. Metal-mesh straps across his chest, hips and thighs held him tight to the bed’s metal surface, as did thick restraints around his wrists and ankles. All that was overkill at the moment — an IV ran into Clark’s right arm, a steady flow of drugs keeping him unconscious.

A voice from behind: “Makes me want to enlist all over again.”

Clarence turned to look at Kevin Cantrell. He was leaning against the wall of his cage, forearm and forehead pressed against the glass. The front of his clear cell looked directly into the front of Clark’s.

“Look at that poor bastard,” Cantrell said. “Years of service, and he’ll die horribly.” The diver tilted his head to the right, toward Edmund, who lay in his bed and would never wake again.

“Or him,” Cantrell said. “Good to know that the fucking navy can heap disgrace upon misery and use our bodies like we’re laboratory mice. I mean, doesn’t all this just make you want to sign up?”

“Already did,” Clarence said.

Cantrell raised his eyebrows, nodded. “Oh, that’s right, your little spat with Doc Feely. You enlisted. You’re one of us, right? Let me guess… Marines?”

“Rangers,” Clarence said. “Then Special Forces. Got shot at plenty, but no one strapped me to a table. I need to talk to you.”

Cantrell shrugged. “It’s not like my calendar is all that full at the moment.”

The man seemed different than he had just a little while earlier. He was calmer. Relaxed. He hadn’t exactly been freaking out earlier, nothing like that, but he’d seemed tense, jittery.

Clarence tilted his head toward Clark. “Sorry about your friend.”

“A real shame,” Cantrell said. “Seems inevitable, though. The pathogen obviously had some kind of reservoir that allowed it to maintain viability all these years. The Los Angeles likely found that reservoir. Clarkie drew the short straw.”

Clarence raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on. At least I think you do, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what you just said.”

Cantrell shrugged. “I know me some biology. I was premed at Duke.”

“Jesus. Not the typical life story of a serviceman. How the hell did you wind up in the navy?”

“Fighting, I’m afraid,” Cantrell said. “I was an angry young black man raging against the inequities of life, even though I’d grown up in the suburbs and had a full ride.”

“You had a full ride to Duke? You must have been one hell of a baller. Point guard?”

Cantrell laughed. “If you were white, I’d call you racist. It was an academic full ride.”

“Oh.” Clarence actually did feel a little racist, which was a strange sensation. “What did you do to get the academic full ride?”

“Perfect score on the SAT.”

Clarence hadn’t even known that was possible. He’d taken the SAT once upon a time. His score was less than perfect, to say the least.

“You had college for free, but couldn’t keep your nose clean. Book smart, but no common sense?”

Cantrell nodded. “No concept of perspective, actually. But close enough.”

“So you enlisted?”

“I did,” Cantrell said. “I was out of options. Thought I’d do the GI Bill and save up enough to actually pay for college on my own, but I wound up in diving school and fell in love with it. I’m sure you’re surprised to hear this, Agent Otto, but in the navy there is no such thing as a dummy diver. You have to be smart just to get in, and smarter to stay alive. In our job, one mistake can get you killed.” He tilted his head toward Clark’s cell. “Or get you infected, apparently.”

Clarence knew that Cantrell might also be infected, might be just one of Tim’s little pricks away from getting a death sentence of his own.

“I read your report,” Clarence said. “I didn’t see any opportunity for Clark to get infected, but it would help if you walked me through what happened when you guys picked up the bodies.”

Cantrell thought for a moment, scratched absently at his throat.

“Okay, sure,” he said. “When the shit hit the fan, Clarkie and I were ordered to suit up and search for bodies from the Los Angeles. We knew that meant a chance of handling infection victims. Our suits are aquatic BSL-4 arrays — positive pressure, completely internalized air, solid seals, similar to what you’re wearing now, only more streamlined for movement. A modified Seahawk flew us out to the target areas.”

“Modified? How?”

“Special lift cage,” Cantrell said. “Same thing we used to retrieve material of interest from the Los Angeles. ROVs from the LA bring up these sealed, decontaminated containers, we collect the containers, get in the lift cage, the Seahawk drops the lift cage near the Brashear’s port side.”

Cantrell pointed behind him, through his clear cell, across the prep area with its stainless steel instruments, to the wide, horizontal airlock door.

“The Brashear’s cargo crane picks up the cage and puts it right there,” he said. “In we go, divers, cage, ROV, even the cable the crane uses to connect to the cage. Anything that could possibly touch the sample container, or touch something that touches the container, gets fully deconned. The airlock seals up, completely fills with bleach, destroying any biocontaminants. When the bleach drains, the inner airlock door opens and we take the container to the prep area. Then we go back into the airlock, get another dose of bleach, then the crane brings us up on deck.”

The decon procedures seemed thorough. And yet, something had still gone wrong.

“So on the night of the attack, the Seahawk takes you and Clark out,” Clarence said. “What was different?”

“You mean other than the screaming, the blood and the fires?”

Clarence paused, nodded. “Other than that.”

“The ’Hawk’s pilot spotted a flasher on Walker’s SEIE suit,” Cantrell said. “Into the drink we went. She was alive when we found her, mumbling about the people she’d killed and how she’d sabotaged the LA.”

“So you touched her?”

The diver rolled his eyes. “No, Agent Otto, we sat back and told her she had nice titties. She was still alive. We were trying to save her.”

“Do you remember what she said?”

Cantrell stared back. “You’ve got my report right in front of you. Read it for yourself.”

The man didn’t want to repeat the words. Why not?

“But do you remember? Can you tell me?”

Cantrell sighed.

“Yeah. She said, I took out the reactor. Then she said, They bit me. I killed them. I shot two of those bastards.”

Clarence read from the statement. Cantrell had it word for word.

“Okay, so what happened then?”

“The ’Hawk dropped the collection cage,” Cantrell said. “Clark and I put Walker inside, then got in with her. We were just about to return to the Brashear when the pilot spotted a second body. Clark and I went back into the drink. Petrovsky was eviscerated, among other significant damage. We loaded him into the cage.”

A cage normally meant for two divers and a container had four people in it, two of them infected. Clarence wondered if there was something to that.

“Did you continue to search for bodies?”

Cantrell shook his head. “Command wanted the Seahawk to return and look for survivors from the Forrest Sherman. No part of the helicopter had touched us or the bodies, if that’s what you’re wondering. The ’Hawk dropped our cage into the water, Brashear’s crane took us up, we got in the airlock just like normal. This time, however, there were two man-size, airtight containers waiting for us. We loaded the bodies into the containers. Feely was talking to us at that point. We went through the bleach bath, then carried the body containers to the morgue trailer.”

Clarence called up Feely’s report. Cantrell’s recall matched the report exactly, as if he were reading directly from it. All except for one thing.

“It says here that when you entered with the bodies and went through the decon bath, you smelled bleach.”

Cantrell paused. “Of course I smelled it,” he said. “They bathe us in it. The suits smell like it when we’re done.”

“I’m not talking about when you’re done. You’re quoted in the report as saying, I smelled bleach during decon step. Maybe a seal leaked.”

Cantrell’s eyes narrowed. Was that a look of… anger?

“That is not accurate,” he said. “Maybe I typed it wrong.”

“So you didn’t smell bleach when you and Clark were submerged in the decon tank?”

Cantrell shook his head. “Not that I recall.”

Clarence reached out into air, called up Clark’s report on his HUD.

“Clark also reported smelling bleach,” Clarence said. “He was worried the suit would fill up with it.”

Cantrell clapped his hands together once, spread them out. “There you go, Agent Otto. Clark told me that right after we finished. I was exhausted. I must have put his words down as mine.”

Clarence studied the man. That explanation sounded perfectly logical. A battle, a high-risk recovery of infected bodies… that kind of stress could lead to significant fatigue, the blurring of memories. But Cantrell seemed to have a near-photographic memory of the event, all except for that one detail.

Had the vector somehow got inside Clark’s suit through a broken seal or a tiny tear that also allowed in a small amount of bleach? If Cantrell was now lying about smelling bleach, he was doing so because he knew evidence of a tear would lengthen his time in the cell. Or could he actually be infected and trying to protect himself? So far, though, Cantrell had tested negative.

Clarence felt he was missing something… but what?

“Let’s go over the entire day again,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? Like you said, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

PHOTO BOMBING

Margaret had thought diving back into this world would be hell. She’d thought working on the bodies of infection victims would further stir up the ever-present memories of Amos Braun, of Perry Dawsey, of Dew Phillips, of Detroit and everything else that had turned her life to shit.

But she didn’t think about any of those things.

In fact, almost as soon as she began the examination, those thoughts faded away. She didn’t think about anything but the work. And, most important, she didn’t think about Clarence.

In that way, at least, donning a BSL-4 suit and standing next to a body that had the potential to wipe out the human race was kind of… well, it was kind of nice.

She slowly ran her gloved hand over Candice Walker’s body. A meticulous search. She had Tim’s report up on the right side of her visor. She was getting the hang of the eye-track navigation; as she found torn pustules and other marks on Candice’s body, she checked to see if Tim had logged them. Maybe he’d missed something. Or, maybe something had grown after he’d completed his initial exam.

Margaret heard a rattle: the heavy, compact Stryker bone saw moving against a prep tray. Tim was cleaning Petrovsky’s powdered bone and that thick rot from the blade, preparing to use the device on the skull of Candice Walker. Petrovsky’s rot was accelerating now. Most of his skin looked black and wet, and it was already sloughing off at his left shoulder to show the sagging, decomposing muscles beneath.

Tim stopped, looked up. “Uh, Doctor Montoya? What are you looking for?”

“Triangles,” she said, turning her attention back to Walker. “I’m looking for any skin growths that would show triangle infection.”

“I checked for that. She doesn’t have the triangles or any Morgellons fibers indicative of a fizzle.”

A fizzle, Amos’s name for an infection that didn’t quite take hold, resulting in red, blue or black fibers growing out of the host’s skin.

Margaret stopped and stared at Tim. “You don’t mind if I look again, do you?” She wasn’t going to have Feely second-guessing her. She already knew his report showed no growths on Candice, but something didn’t add up. Triangle victims often cut into themselves, but Candice didn’t have triangles. She had crawlers; crawler hosts didn’t mutilate themselves. So why had Walker cut off her own arm?

Tim met Margaret’s gaze. He slowly raised a gore-slimed, gloved hand in front of his visor, making a monotone noise as he did. When his hand moved in front of his eyes, he made a crashing sound, held the hand still.

The world is in danger, and this asshole is playing games?

“Tim, what are you doing?”

“Raising my blast shields,” he said. “Your death stare will not take me down, Vader.”

For the second time that day, she laughed. There were two dead bodies on the table, both infected with a potentially world-killing pathogen, and Tim Feely made her laugh.

He lowered the hand just enough for his eyes to peek over. “Am I safe?”

“For now,” Margaret said. “Stop playing.” She pointed to the ravaged stub of Walker’s severed arm. “Your initial report said she did this to herself?”

He nodded.

“How do you know?”

Tim started tapping at the air. He was calling something up on his HUD, but the action still seemed odd; it made him look crazy.

“Here’s how,” he said. He grabbed the air in front of his face, made a tossing gesture in Margaret’s direction. Inside her visor, Tim’s report shrank down to a tiny icon at the lower left. Her vision filled with a series of images.

A reciprocal saw, the long device so ubiquitous in the construction field: red, industrial-plastic handle, just big enough to hold with one fist; the same plastic on the saw’s thick body, where the other hand would cup it from underneath; the blade guard and finally the blade itself, eight inches long, designed to slide back and forth so fast you couldn’t even see its jagged points.

Margaret reached out into the air, swiped left to right. The next picture showed Candice Walker’s left fingers wrapped around the saw’s handle. The saw lay across her chest, the blade against the severed stump of her right arm. Margaret looked through her visor, down at the real thing, then refocused on the image — if Candice had cut herself, the angle of the wound was exactly right.

The third picture showed a close-up of gouges in Candice’s ulna — a failed cut, one that hadn’t gone through. The saw blade sat neatly in the groove, a perfect fit.

She swiped again to see the fourth and final picture: a smiling, biosafety-suited Tim Feely holding the saw and leaning down by Walker’s face. He was giving a thumbs-up.

“Feely, you really are an asshole,” Margaret said. “You play with the dead?”

He shrugged. “There was no one else to play with. But now you’re here.” He waggled his eyebrows.

Another crass innuendo. Maybe that was his way of dealing with the pressure of the situation. Or… or maybe he was actually interested. Either way, she didn’t have time for it.

Thoughts of Tim Feely’s advances faded away. The missing arm still didn’t add up. If Candice had the crawlers, and crawlers that took over her brain, then why did she mutilate herself when no other known crawler host ever had?

“There’s something different about Walker,” Margaret said. “Are you finished processing Petrovsky’s brain?”

Tim nodded. “I am. It’s turning into black goop, but there was enough to see that it was riddled with the crawler mesh. If that ever happens to me, hopefully your hubby will put me down like the dog that I am.”

She didn’t know if Tim was serious about that request or just talking to deal with the stress. He had no way of knowing Clarence had done exactly that to infection victims in the past, and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.

Margaret stroked Candice Walker’s hair one more time. In a few moments, Tim would slide a scalpel across the back of her scalp, then flip the scalp down over her face so he could use the Stryker saw to open her skull.

She heard a click in her helmet speakers, then, Clarence’s voice.

“Margaret, can you and Doctor Feely hear me?”

“I can,” she said. She looked at Tim, who gave a thumbs-up. “So can Tim.”

“Good,” Clarence said. “Listen, I’m finished with Cantrell’s interview. There’s some things I want to talk about.”

“So get in here,” Margaret said.

“Uh, can I report from the control room? This suit, I’ve been in it for two hours.”

Tim rolled his eyes.

“Yes, but make it fast,” Margaret said. “We’ll keep working until you’re ready. Tim, call up the images of crawlers from both Petrovsky and Walker. Let’s take a look while we wait.”

RED HOT MOMMA

For most of the last five years, Tim Feely had enjoyed collecting a huge paycheck and not doing a whole lot to earn it. He worked hard at whatever anyone asked him to do — well, at least he made it look like he was working hard — but he had harbored a hope that this infection crap was over forever, and that his black-budget gravy train would last for decades.

Obviously, he’d been wrong. This shit was real. If the infection got out, it could literally end the world. Like it or not, he was smack-dab in the middle of it.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: he got to work with Margaret Montoya. The Margaret Montoya. She didn’t understand what a legend she had become in scientific circles. For reasons Tim couldn’t fathom, she seemed to be concerned with what regular people thought, people who knew nothing about science, nothing about how her genius had saved their uneducated asses.

Plus, she was fine. Margaret wanted to pretend that she and Clarence were solid, but Tim sensed friction. A marriage cracking at the seams, if it hadn’t already shattered. Tim liked his women older, smart and powerful: Margaret was all three. He was helping save the world, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep the game afoot. Pursuing a sexy woman gave him an edge, helped distract him from worrying about the fact that he’d probably never leave this ship alive.

While that pansy Agent Otto got out of his suit, Tim made good use of the time.

“Okay, Doctor Montoya,” Tim said, “I’ve queued up the images of dead crawlers from Petrovsky and Walker. Ready for the side-by-side comparison?”

“I am. And please, call me Margaret.”

“Can I call you Red Hot Momma?”

“You may not,” she said. “The crawlers, please?”

Tim eye-tracked through his HUD menus, called up the prepared video, then grabbed and tossed it at Margaret so that both of their visor displays showed the same thing: a side-by-side progression of dead crawler images. Walker’s were on the left, Petrovsky’s on the right.

Margaret made a clucking sound with her tongue as she thought. “Walker’s crawlers, they’re in an odd state of decay. Almost like they were… melted.”

At first glance, the crawlers all looked similar to oversized nerve cells: each consisted of a large, roundish end with dendrites that extended, split, and split again like tree branches; a long, thin central body, or axon; and finally a tail end that spread out in thin axon terminals. Closer examination, however, revealed that the crawlers were actually made up of modified muscle cells that could reach, that could grab and then crawl toward the brain.

Tim had been far too busy to do any comparative analysis. Lives had been at stake. As he looked at the images side-by-side for the first time, he saw immediate differences.

“Walker’s aren’t decomposing the same way as Petrovsky’s,” he said. “Petrovsky’s crawlers have spreading clusters of black spots, starting small and expanding, like a banana that’s just starting to go bad. With Walker’s, the cell damage looks uniform, like something is affecting them all at once. You hit the nail on the head — they look like they’re melting. You didn’t see anything like that in your prior work?”

Margaret shook her head. “No, we didn’t. We studied Carmen Sanchez through the whole crawler-infection process. Nothing like this in him, or in Betty Jewell, and she was in an advanced state of the apoptosis chain reaction. This… this is new.”

She reached out, manipulating her images. Tim eye-tracked through his menu, altering his display so he saw exactly what she saw. Margaret had zoomed in on Walker’s crawler.

“Uniform damage,” she said quietly. “These crawlers started out alive, moving, then something made them start to dissolve.” She reached out again, wiped away the images from Petrovsky. Only Walker’s remained. “You said you also extracted live crawlers from Walker. Can I see them?”

Tim menued through to the video he’d recorded. “Let me get one on visual.”

The image came up. Still moving, still twitching, still reaching. He placed it side by side with the dead, melted crawler.

Margaret stared at the two images for a moment. “Walker’s crawlers are significantly different. I’ve never seen this form before.”

Tim felt his face flush with embarrassment that he hadn’t spotted it himself. Unlike all the other crawler images, this one didn’t have the spreading axon terminals at the tail end, just a long, thin body and the dendrite arms on what he presumed to be the top — and even that part was unusual. Where a normal crawler’s dendrite arms looked like a stubby tree with many branches, the living sample only had five arms of varying lengths.

Margaret’s eyes changed focus. Instead of seeing the images inside her visor, she looked through them to stare at Tim.

“Feely, why the hell didn’t you tell me they looked different?”

His face flushed deeper, but this time with anger. “I didn’t notice. There wasn’t time to do any in-depth work.”

She put her hands on her hips, a gesture that looked oddly out of place for someone wearing a bulky biosafety suit.

“Didn’t have time? Are you kidding me?”

Tim stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, Montoya, but there was a goddamn battle up top!”

Her hands slid off her hips. She looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to her that he could blow up at someone. Well, he had, and he couldn’t stop the volcano of frustration and grief that came blasting out.

“I did what I could,” he said. “There weren’t enough hands to go around. I had to make snap decisions. If I took too much time to save one man, three others would die.”

The ship’s doctors, overwhelmed. Bodies all over the deck. He’d been covered in blood… the smell of burned flesh, the screams, people begging for help… all the drugs in the world weren’t going to erase those two days. His anger faded. He saw the faces of men who had looked at him, looked right at him when he was already writing them off because they were too far gone.

And then there was Murray’s order to collect some crawlers and seal them up for shipment to Black Manitou. Tim had done that the day of the battle, grabbing a few samples from Petrovsky and sending them on. He knew he should have fought that order, but all he wanted to do was satisfy Murray’s request so he could get back to the wounded. Murray had sworn Tim to secrecy on that — Tim couldn’t tell anyone, and in truth, he was ashamed of caving in and didn’t want to tell anyone.

“I worked two days straight to save as many as I could. The only time I stopped was when Yasaka had two men drag me — literally drag me — down here to do some basic sample gathering on Walker and Petrovsky. And when I came down, I made sure not to touch the bodies, at all, just on the off chance I might bring contagion up with me when I returned to the wounded. I only used needles to gather samples, and I gathered those samples as quickly as I could. Know why? I had more important things to do than play with corpses. So no, Margaret, I didn’t pay that much attention to the motherfucking crawlers.”

Margaret sighed. She looked sad.

“I apologize,” she said. “I should know better. We have so little time to get this work done. I’m sure I’m missing things, and there are tests we should be running that just have to wait because we don’t have the resources. Everything is hurried, rushed, and you had it even worse with all the wounded. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

He could see she meant it. The sincerity of her response made his anger fade away as quickly as it had erupted.

Tim shrugged, feeling the bulk of his suit on his shoulders when he did.

“You’re really sorry?”

She nodded.

“Sorry enough for apology sex?”

“Not that sorry, no.”

“Oh well, worth a try.”

Margaret shook her head, a sad dismissal of his feeble attempt. She focused on the images in her HUD.

“These new crawlers from Walker… where exactly were they inside her body?”

“The pustules,” Tim said. “That was the fastest and easiest place to get a sample, so I started there. I collected crawlers from other areas as well, but all of those were dead. And, come to think of it, all of the dead ones look the same as those I collected from Petrovsky.”

Margaret frowned. She reached out, turning the image of the living crawler, looking at it from multiple angles. “Sanchez had pustules, but what was in them didn’t look like these. So we know that Walker definitely had the old kind of crawlers, the ones we saw back in Detroit, the same that are in Petrovsky, but she also had this new kind.”

Tim studied the images on his own HUD. The new crawlers reminded him of a microorganism he’d seen way back in his undergrad days.

“They kind of look like hydras,” he said.

Margaret nodded. “Yeah, a little bit. As good a name as any for the variant.” She stared. The tip of her tongue traced her upper lip. “So the hydras and the crawlers were in Walker at the same time, but only the crawlers were melted.”

Tim watched the real-time image of the hydra, watched it reach and move, searching for something to grab onto. Walker’s crawlers had melted; Petrovsky’s, Sanchez’s and Jewell’s had not. Her hydras were the only known variable.

“Maybe the hydras killed the crawlers,” he said. “Something they secreted, perhaps.”

Margaret thought about that for a moment. “Possibly. But… why? Crawlers and hydras are on the same side, so to speak.”

“Maybe it’s a new design,” Tim said. “The first round of infections — with Perry Dawsey and the other early victims — they only had the triangular growths. But later on, when Detroit got crazy, you saw the crawler-based infections, and even that woman you said blew up like a puffball.”

The look on Margaret’s face made it clear she didn’t want to remember that moment.

“The disease seemed to adapt,” she said. “We stopped the triangles. In the following outbreak the disease expressed itself in at least two new ways.”

Tim closed his eyes, let his brain work through the details, hoping he could find that spark of inspiration. “We’ve had no new activity since the Orbital was shot down. Now we find a piece of the Orbital, and blammo, we’ve a third new form. So it’s reasonable to hypothesize that all the designs originated with the Orbital. You stopped the first attempt, the Dawsey-era infections, so it retooled and tried again with the things you saw in Detroit. You stopped that, so maybe it was already making additional changes when it was shot down. Maybe the hydras are that new design.”

Margaret bit at her lower lip. “Maybe. But that doesn’t explain why hydras would kill crawlers. Why would the Orbital make something that kills something else the Orbital made?”

Tim didn’t have an answer for that. He felt like he was on the right path, although he couldn’t see where that path ended.

“Well, the hydras aren’t an accident,” he said. “The infection reprogrammed Walker’s body to make them.”

Margaret’s eyes stared off, seemed to lose focus. Her lips moved slightly, like she was talking quietly to herself.

“An accident,” she said. She closed her eyes, kept mumbling to herself like a student trying to work out a complex math problem. Tim wasn’t even sure if she knew he was there anymore.

“Tim, what if was an accident. Or rather, a mutation. Maybe there was something different about Walker’s body, about the way her cellular factories reacted to the infection’s reprogramming.” Margaret blinked rapidly, raised her eyebrows — her eyes again focused on him. “Can you get Walker’s medical records?”

“Of course. What do you want to know?”

“Start with her medical history. Maybe there’s something unusual in her system that wasn’t in the other victims.”

Tim called up Walker’s records, scanned through the usual list of military checkups, inoculations, physicals… then found exactly what Margaret was looking for: something unusual.

“She had lupus,” he said.

Margaret shook her head. “That can’t be it. I can’t see how an autoimmune disease would affect the crawlers. They hijack stem cells to produce copies of themselves.”

Tim looked deeper in the record. When he found the next difference, he felt his heart start to hammer.

“Jesus, Margaret… Walker underwent HAC therapy to treat the lupus.”

Margaret narrowed her eyes, not understanding. “What’s HAC therapy?”

That question surprised Tim. She hadn’t just tuned out from life, she’d tuned out from medicine altogether. She wasn’t even reading research journals.

“HAC is human artificial chromosome treatment. It’s an experimental way to treat genetic defects. The process introduces a new chromosome into stem cells. The end result is stem cells with forty-seven chromosomes instead of the normal forty-six that all cells are supposed to have. The forty-seventh chromosome probably has a myriad of immune system modulators meant to reprogram cells to stop the autoimmune effects of lupus — new transcription factors, genetic code to modify gene response, et cetera. In some cases HAC even introduces fully artificial gene sequences.”

Even as he said the words, it struck him how similar the process sounded to the Orbital’s infection strategy: targeted changes to the host’s DNA, altering the processes created by millions of years of evolution. Was humanity that far away from harnessing the very technology that threatened to wipe it out forever?

Margaret’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. Normally, she looked like she couldn’t hurt a fly, but now her expression was that of a predator.

“An artificial chromosome in stem cells,” she said. “Maybe the Orbital’s technology can’t properly integrate that forty-seventh chromosome.”

She nodded, slowly at first, then gradually faster.

“This therapy,” she said. “Where did Walker get it?”

“Let me check.” Tim read through Walker’s records. “Looks like a clinic within the Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Cutting-edge stuff, only ten people in the trial.”

Margaret thought for a moment. Her excitement seemed to grow.

“Correlation isn’t causation, but this is one hell of a correlation,” she said. “We need to see if these new, larger crawlers colonized Walker’s brain, like the older ones colonized Petrovsky’s. Let’s find out right now.”

Tim walked to his prep tray and lifted the compact Stryker saw, preparing to cut into Walker’s skull.

PREPROGRAMMING

Perhaps a thousand modified neutrophils had reached Charlie Petrovsky’s squamous epithelium. Most of them died there, wiped out by the ever-growing apoptosis chain reaction that steadily turned Charlie into a pile of black sludge.

Some, however, held on to life, held on just long enough for a gloved hand to brush against Charlie’s skin.

When that gloved hand moved away, a dozen neutrophils moved with it.

They emitted a new chemical, an airborne signal that announced their presence to any other neutrophils that might be near. If a neutrophil detected that chemical coming from mostly one direction, it moved in that direction: flow, reach, pull… flow, reach, pull. If it detected roughly equal amounts of the chemical coming from multiple directions, it stayed where it was. This simple process created an instant implementation of quorum sensing, of individuals using a basic cue to communicate as a single individual.

The microscopic neutrophils had a relatively massive area to cover. The equivalent, perhaps, of a dozen mice scattered onto an area the size of a dozen football fields. Much ground to cover, and yet the neutrophils had been designed for this very action.

Three were too weak to make the journey. They expired along the way, leaving nine that found each other, amorphous blobs pressing in on each other.

At the center of this shifting pile, three neutrophils underwent a rapid physical change. They altered their internal workings to produce a caustic chemical, a chemical specifically preprogrammed by the Orbital some five years earlier. This trio pressed themselves flat against the Tyvek material of the gloves upon which they rode. The trio started to swell, to fill with fluid, until — following those same, preprogrammed instructions — they sacrificed themselves by tearing open their own cell walls.

The caustic chemical spilled onto the Tyvek: just a microscopic drop, something not even visible to the naked eye, but enough to weaken the material, to create a tiny divot.

Another neutrophil flowed into the divot, then repeated the process, deepening the hole. Then another, and another.

The chemical burst of the last one was enough to punch all the way through.

Pressurized air flowed out, an infinitesimal, nearly immeasurable amount, sliding past the flat bodies of the seventh and eight neutrophils that climbed through the microscopic hole all the way to the glove’s inner surface. These, too, began a phase change — their bodies quickly split into dozens of tiny, self-contained particles.

Those particles flaked away, scattered like an invisible shower onto the skin of the person wearing the gloves. There the particles began to burrow.

The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned. It knew of the primitive-yet-effective technology the humans had developed to protect themselves from infection. Drawing on the knowledge of a vastly superior technology, the Orbital had prepared a way to defeat this protection.

The last neutrophil sensed that its fellow microbes had succeeded. It underwent the final portion of the preprogrammed dance. It slid into the microscopic hole and began to swell, bloating until it pushed against the sides.

Air stopped flowing out of the glove.

That final neutrophil hardened, then died, fulfilling its role as nothing more than a plug in a hole so tiny it would take an electron microscope to see it, if anyone ever looked.

And no one ever would.

IT’S ABOUT CANTRELL

Clarence needed a shower. At least he was out of that suit. Built-in air conditioner or not, when he wore it, he sweated like a whore in church — probably less from any heat and more because of what waited just outside of the thin material.

He sat in the small control center that looked down through the clear roofs of the three science modules. The console in front of him and the walls on either side were packed with computers, monitors and communication equipment — neat, tidy, space-conscious military design. The built-in microphone in front of him let him speak to people in the modules; speakers in the console let him hear them talk.

Through the control center’s glass, he saw Margaret and Tim working away. They’d pulled Candice Walker’s scalp down over her face. The inside-out flesh looked bone-white, smeared with tacky blood. Tim was cutting into her skull with a handheld saw.

Clarence had been in the BSL-4 suit for about two hours, total, and had been counting the minutes until he could get out of it. He didn’t know how Margaret and Feely managed it so well; the two of them would probably be in their suits for another eight to ten hours, at least. They had both opted for devices that allowed them to urinate and defecate while still in the suit.

You told her she’s not a soldier. You can barely keep your suit on for ninety minutes but she can piss and shit inside of hers for twenty-four hours straight if she has to.

Not that Clarence hadn’t faced his own fair share of awful conditions. In Iraq, his unit had been pinned down. Waiting for support, he and his buddy, Louis Oakley, had hidden behind rocks, suffering 120-degree heat while dreading that the next bullet would hit home. Lou-Lou took a round to the head. He died instantly. Clarence had lain there for the better part of a day, unable to move away from the corpse, willing his body to press closer to the ground. Louis had looked on, unblinking.

Clarence shook his head, came back to the moment. No time to get lost in those memories.

He finished up the notes from his interview with Cantrell. Margaret preferred her information summarized, the most-important stuff bullet-pointed right up top. If she needed info beyond that summary, she would ask.

At times, being in a relationship with a woman who was clearly much, much smarter than he was felt a little intimidating. In their day-to-day life it hadn’t been noticeable — she was a woman, he was a man, things worked out. But when it came to talking politics, finances, history, or — God forbid — science, the gap in their IQs became clear. At least he knew more about football than she did. Or, at least that’s what she let him believe. He was never really sure about that one.

Clarence turned on the microphone. “Margo, is now still a good time?”

She and Tim stopped what they were doing, looked up. Margaret nodded.

Tim had a shit-eating grin on his face. “Suit’s a little stuffy, eh, fella? You want me to go to the kitchen and fetch you a nice glass of lemonade to cool you off?”

Clarence ground his teeth in embarrassment.

“Or some talcum powder,” Tim said. “Maybe your bottom is damp?”

Margaret reached out, slapped Tim lightly on the shoulder. He stopped talking, but the grin didn’t go away. Was he actually posturing, trying to impress Margaret? At a time like this, the guy was hitting on her?

Just hope we never step into the ring, you little runt. We’ll find out who’s the better man.

“Margo,” Clarence said, “verbal or send it to your HUD?”

She tapped her visor. “HUD. Tim’s as well.”

Clarence did as he was asked.

Both Tim and Margaret read through the info playing on the inside of their visors.

“Fancy,” Tim said. “It’s like Cliff’s Notes for Holy Shit the World Is Going to End Theater. Bullet points? Please, Agent Otto, don’t spend any time going into actual detail.”

“Tim, cut it out,” Margaret said, still reading. “This is how I want my data. Clarence knows what I like.”

That line shut Tim up. He glared up at the control booth. Clarence knew Margaret hadn’t meant anything sexual by the reference, but he couldn’t help but give Tim a little nod that said, Awww yeah, I know what she likes, and you never will.

Margaret tapped the air, shutting off the report.

“The bleach thing is interesting,” she said. “Is anyone checking their suits for holes or malfunctions?”

“I asked Captain Yasaka if someone could test them,” Clarence said. “She’s going to have the nonquarantined divers run a pressurized rate of fall test as soon as they can, probably first thing tomorrow morning. The divers pressurize the suit and watch the gauges, see if there is a loss greater than expected. In other words, fill it with air and see if it leaks.”

“The holes could be small,” Tim said. “The crawler spores are tiny. We’re talking microns, here. Gauges might not show pressure loss from something that size.”

Clarence nodded. “Correct, which is why if they don’t find a leak that way, they will then go for a full submersion test. They need our airlock for that, the big one that leads outside the ship.”

Margaret waved a hand dismissively. “Any hole so small the pressure test won’t show it is too small to worry about. I mean, a spore or a crawler would have to randomly land on that tiny hole, and somehow fall through that hole when the suits are pressurized to push air out, and then still land on skin.”

Her eyes again focused on the report displaying inside her visor.

“You emphasize Cantrell’s intelligence,” she said. “Why?”

“When he told me what happened, it was almost a word-for-word rendition of what he wrote in his incident report,” Clarence said. “He remembered what he said perfectly, all except for smelling bleach. It strikes me odd he has perfect recall for everything save for that one detail.”

“So you think Cantrell is lying,” Tim said.

Clarence wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Something just didn’t seem to add up.

“Maybe, maybe not. Another thing about that report struck me as odd. When he and Clark reached Walker, one of the things she said was they bit me. Did you guys find a bite mark on her body?”

“None,” Tim said. “But just because we didn’t find one doesn’t mean Clark and Cantrell were lying about hearing her say that.”

Clarence rubbed his face. He already felt so damn tired. “Yeah, that’s a good point. But the bleach discrepancy still bothers me. Maybe Tim should test him again.”

Margaret tapped the report back on, read something, tapped it back off.

“It’s been thirty-six hours since Cantrell was exposed,” she said. “If he was infected, he’d have probably come up positive by now. Even if he’s got a longer incubation period than we’ve seen in the past, he’s being tested every three hours so we’ll find out soon enough. He’s scheduled for his next test in twenty minutes. Clarence, can you take over the testing duties? I need Doctor Feely here with me.”

Clarence looked at Tim.

Tim nodded: Awwww yeah.

Clarence ground his teeth. “Sure, Margo,” he said. “I’ll make sure Cantrell is tested every three hours.”

She turned back to the table. Tim got to work; Clarence heard the bone saw’s whine even through the control room’s security glass.

Then, Margaret turned back. She stared up at Clarence.

He had seen that look on her face before. She had figured something out, or was just on the edge of doing so.

“Margo, what is it?”

She looked down at Walker’s corpse. Margaret lifted the severed arm, stared at it.

“The bite,” she said. “Walker claimed to be bitten, but there are no bite marks. What if she was bitten on the arm?”

Tim stopped cutting into the skull. “You’re thinking she cut off her own arm not because she was infected, like Dawsey, but because she thought it would prevent her from being infected?”

“Maybe,” she said.

Tim set the saw on a tray. He reached out into the air and started calling up information.

Clarence tried to imagine himself in Walker’s shoes. A submarine full of people, some of them turning into killers, killers that worked together like those soldiers in Michigan did during the last outbreak… and nowhere to run.

“It can spread from a bite?” he asked.

“Probably,” Margaret said. “Some of the infection victims had growths on the tongue that could spread the contagion. But what matters is if Walker thought it could spread from a bite. Maybe she saw her friends being turned into murderers, maybe she did anything she could to not become one herself.”

“Like a zombie movie,” Clarence said. “You think she got bit, panicked, did what she thought might keep her from becoming one of the bad guys?”

Tim shook his head. “Timeline doesn’t add up for that,” he said. “She cut off that arm around thirty-eight hours ago. Based on the state of her crawlers, she was already heavily infected by that time. She was already… what’s the word I want… oh, she was already converted. Why would she cut off her own arm if one of her own kind bit her? Hell, Margaret, why would one of them bite her at all? The Converted all work together, like ants in a colony.”

“My point exactly,” Margaret said. Her eyes were sharp, full of sudden assuredness. “The Converted. That’s an excellent term. Candice Walker had crawlers, absolutely, but she was not converted. Feely, get that brain out, and get it out now.”

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Steve Stanton was done with the cold weather. The small stateroom he shared with Bo Pan wasn’t toasty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was easily thirty degrees warmer than it was up on deck. Plus, no wind. Plus, no ice-cold water spray.

Maybe he should have hired a bigger boat. The guest stateroom was smaller than his freshman dorm room back at Berkeley. It was cramped to begin with — sharing the space with Bo Pan made it miserable. Bo Pan didn’t do much, mostly just sat in his bunk. Sat and watched Steve type code.

A small table built into the wall held two of Steve’s three laptops. The other rested on top of the blankets of his bunk (he got the top bunk — he was the “boss” of this trip, after all).

Cooper had warned him that spending too much time belowdecks could lead to seasickness, but so far Steve had felt no ill effects. If anything, the constant rocking motion made him hungry. He chewed mouthfuls of Doritos, which he washed down with swigs of Diet Coke. He felt Bo Pan staring at him. Steve kept typing, tried to ignore his bunkmate.

“Disgusting,” Bo Pan said. “I do not know how you eat such garbage. We have paid to rent this boat. They would let me use the little kitchen. I could cook you something.”

Steve tipped the bag of Doritos toward the old man. “Breakfast of champions, Bo Pan. Want some? Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch, can’t go wrong.”

Bo Pan’s face wrinkled in disgust. He looked away.

Steve shrugged and reached in for more. Imagine the dichotomy: Bo “King of Phlegm” Pan calling someone else disgusting.

“Your machine,” Bo Pan said. “Do you have its twat yet?”

Steve’s eyebrows rose. “Uh, its what?”

Bo Pan leaned back slightly, confused. “Twat. Is that not what you call it? The Twatter messages your machine sends?”

“Ah,” Steve said. “Twitter. It’s a tweet, not a twat. Big difference.”

The old man waved a hand, a gesture that might as well have been sign language for get off my lawn. “Have you received any?”

“Not yet. I’m sure it will twat at any moment.”

Using Twitter to send and receive messages from the Platypus had been an act of genius, if Steve did say so himself. Twitter boasted five hundred million accounts sending up to three hundred million tweets a day. It added up to an overwhelming amount of data flying across the Internet, 140 characters at a time. The typhoon of content was a perfect place for hiding messages, especially if they corresponded with a code held only by the receiver and the sender. Get in the kitchen and make me some pie might be an innocuous quote from a TV show, but if Steve sent it from his account, @MonstaMush, to @TheMadPlatypus, his lovely machine would know it was time to return to the launch point.

There were over a thousand such tweet-based commands stored in the Platypus’s memory. Steve had programmed his baby to surface periodically and log on to the Internet by using a communication method ubiquitous throughout the United States: cell-phone signals.

Even though the UUV’s sonar-dampening “fur” made it practically invisible to sonar, the U.S. naval assets in the area still made surfacing dangerous; Steve had to limit the number of surface trips the Platypus could make.

He called up a bathymetry map of Lake Michigan. Different bands of color represented different depths: reds and yellows for zero to 50 feet, greens into greenish-blue to 150 feet, blues through 300. There hadn’t been a color for depths beyond 300 feet, because Lake Michigan’s average depth was 279 feet. So Steve had programmed more: blue-purple to purple for 300 to 500 feet, purple to dark purple for 501 to 800 feet, dark purple to black for the deepest spots the lake had to offer.

The Platypus’s destination? The blackest spot on the map. Bo Pan’s coordinates were in a spot known as Chippewa Basin, the very bottom of which was 923 feet deep.

“How solid are these coordinates?” Steve asked. “I’ll program a search field. It would help to know how far out I have to plot for.”

The old man shrugged. He shrugged a lot.

“I only know what I have been told,” he said. “It is the same location the American navy has. That means ROVs and divers will be in the area. You had better hope your claims of near invisibility are accurate.”

Steve rocked slightly back and forth. He tried to control his excitement. Not just excitement, but also fear, stress and anxiety. He believed he’d constructed the most advanced UUV ever created. Manufacturers and fabricators in a dozen countries had provided parts, had unknowingly helped him build the Platypus. He’d had a huge budget to make his creation, but there was another organization with a far bigger checkbook: the U.S. Navy.

The navy had remotely operated vehicles. The navy had unmanned vehicles. The navy had some of the best minds in the world creating, designing, building. But the navy had one limitation that Steve did not — the navy itself. Proposals, funding, approvals, bidding, construction checks, supervised tests… dozens of administrative layers and miles of red tape that slowed down the creative process. Steve suffered through none of those things.

The Platypus incorporated the best components. Some were prototypes from other designers, things that had yet to enter beta testing, let alone hit the market. Others, Steve had designed himself. The biggest advantage, however, was that Steve had designed the Platypus for one purpose and one purpose only — military contractors had to make machines that could do multiple things in order to serve multiple masters.

If Steve’s creation went up against black-budget DARPA machines, which would come out on top? Could he really out-invent the world’s largest buyer of weapons?

Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spat it into his cup with a wet plop. He smiled. “You seem nervous.”

Steve felt instantly insulted. “Nervous? No. Just excited. Well, a little nervous. We don’t know what the navy has. If something goes wrong with the Platypus and it can’t surface to send a signal, we’d never hear from it again. We’d never know what went wrong.”

The old man’s smile faded. “Do you know how much money was spent on your machine?”

Steve shook his head.

“Guess,” Bo Pan said. “I am curious if you are even close.”

Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.

“Um… eighteen million?”

Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.

“Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”

A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.

“One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”

Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.

One hundred and ten million dollars…

“I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”

Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”

The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.

CLEAR YOUR MIND

Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.

Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.

Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”

Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margaret could have seen with the naked eye.

She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

There weren’t any.

Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”

Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.

“Tim, is there any evidence of the black rot in Walker’s brain?”

He shook his head. “No, none.” He looked at Walker’s body. “In fact, I haven’t observed any apoptosis on her at all — according to the normal timeline, we should be seeing that by now. She’s just not rotting like Petrovsky and the other infected victims.”

Melted crawlers… no rot… no growths in the brain…

The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a glorious conclusion.

“Candice was infected by crawlers, but not under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”

“Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”

She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.

“I can’t calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”

Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.

“Your engineered yeast,” she said. “You’ve taken genetic information out of the crawlers, put it into the yeast. You can get your yeast to produce the catalyst that kills the crawlers.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “But like I told you, the catalyst kills the yeast as well. So it’s a dead end.”

“Was a dead end. The hydras survive an environment that kills the crawlers, Tim. If we can figure out how they survive it—”

“Maybe we can put that survival trait in the yeast,” Tim finished, his eyes wide with renewed energy. “Then we could generate huge colonies of yeast that would produce the catalyst… an endless supply of something that kills crawlers dead.”

Margaret reached out, grabbed Tim’s shoulder. If they weren’t in the suits, she might have kissed the man.

“Tim, I think the hydras made Candice immune to the infection, to the crawlers, to all of it. We still don’t know what the hydras are, what else they can do to a host, but if we can figure out how they survive when crawlers die, and if we can reproduce that ability… maybe we can make everyone immune.”

GET LICKED

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy didn’t know much about the original infection.

Like everyone else in the world, he’d been glued to the news when that disaster hit. He’d watched reports of Detroit’s blistering end and the aftermath that followed. He’d heard the endless public service announcements hammering home the acronym “T.E.A.M.S.” Like everyone else, he knew the methods of transmission: get infected by a spore, or get licked — yes, literally licked — by a host.

But since then, God had created new vectors.

Orin didn’t have to lick people. All he had to do was touch them. He didn’t know how he knew this, he just knew. Touch them, and a few days later, they would be his kind.

An even greater illustration of God’s perfection and power? He didn’t have to always touch people directly — if he touched a surface, then someone else touched it shortly after, that alone could be enough to spread God’s love.

Soon, the humans would come for him, try and make him take the cellulose test, but he wouldn’t be where they expected him to be. It was time to wander. Surrounded by a ship full of people who wanted to kill him, he would stay out of sight as best he could. He would avoid attracting attention.

The longer he went without being caught, the more people he could touch.

CHEMISTRY

Before Tim could find out how the hydras survived when the crawlers melted, he had to identify what, exactly, melted those crawlers.

To solve this puzzle, he had to find the key differences between two human corpses. Both bodies had come from an identical environment: the Los Angeles. Although there were significant variables — one was male, the other female, with additional differences in size and genetic background — for all intents and purposes those two bodies were the same. One had suffered the infection’s final-stage brain modification, the other had not.

That made Tim’s job theoretically simple: all he had to do was identify something in Candice Walker that was not in Charlie Petrovsky.

He stood alone in the analysis module, running tests on blood, tissues, organs, even bone. Chemical breakdown, mass spectrometry, DNA analysis, any test he and Margaret could think of for which they had the equipment onboard — and they had a lot of equipment.

She checked in with him every fifteen to twenty minutes, a hyper Latina with the newfound energy of a chipmunk on meth. She was working with the hydras, trying to figure out what they were. Just another Orbital weapon? Or, possibly, something else.

Margaret wasn’t the same person who had arrived, what, just a scant fifteen hours earlier? She’d shown up ready to work, certainly, but not like this: now she had a nuclear reactor for a soul that made her tireless, unceasing.

Tim wanted her more than ever. He’d worshipped Margaret Montoya from afar, mesmerized by the intellect he’d seen reflected in the words and recordings of her Detroit research. The word genius didn’t do her justice.

His visor display started flashing an icon: the blinking, red exclamation point of an alert. Tim eye-tracked to it, called it up.

Four hours after he’d begun his comparative analysis between Petrovsky and Walker, the Brashear’s computer had identified a significant discrepancy in mass spectrometry. Walker’s blood showed a massive spike of an unidentified chemical compound that wasn’t present in Petrovsky, not even in trace amounts.

Whatever it was, she had a ton of it in her system. Was this compound related to the hydras? Was it the reason the hydras lived and the crawlers died? Or was it why Walker didn’t suffer the black rot?

And why was this mystery chemical so concentrated in her blood?

Her blood…

Petrovsky’s tissue…

“Fuck,” Tim said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

He activated his comms. “Margo, you there?”

She answered immediately. “Yes, Tim. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Shittyballs, I’m way more than fine. I need you to find the least-rotted bit of Petrovsky.”

“Uh, sure,” she said. “You want to tell me why?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

At least he hoped she would.

THE LOS ANGELES

The stateroom felt ice cold, but Steve Stanton couldn’t stop sweating.

He sat at the tiny table, drinking Diet Coke and eating Doritos, hoping his two laptops would give some signal. One hundred and ten million dollars… was that investment sitting dead on the bottom of Lake Michigan?

Bo Pan spent his time either sleeping or on his cell phone. Steve didn’t know who Bo Pan was talking to, but the conversations revolved around more aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces than one man could possibly have. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Bo Pan was sharing information about Steve’s work, getting details about the activities of the nearby navy ships — Steve and the Platypus had their code; Bo Pan and his handlers obviously had theirs.

“Steve, it is late,” Bo Pan said. “You told me your machine would contact us an hour ago.” The old man lay in his bunk, spit cup in hand, bushy eyebrows framing black, emotionless eyes.

“Relax,” Steve said. He tried to sound confident. “It might be staying below because of high levels of navy activity. Sometimes this is more an art than a science.”

Bo Pan picked his nose. “I see,” he said as he wiped a booger on his jeans. “Then perhaps we should have spent all that money to get you an art degree.”

The coldness of Bo Pan’s voice made Steve swallow, which drove a flake of Dorito into his throat. Steve tried to wash it back with Diet Coke, but coughed before he could get it down. He managed to turn his head and spray caramel-colored foam onto the wall instead of onto his computers.

Bo Pan huffed. “Breakfast of champions. I can’t wait to see how you handle your dinner.”

Steve managed to flip the old man the bird as he brought his coughing under control.

Bo Pan seemed… different. He’d always acted like a beaten-down laborer, a man who’d spent his life taking shit from everyone. Since the Mary Ellen left the harbor, however, he seemed more self-assured, in control.

No, no… Steve was just stressing out, imagining things. Bo Pan was Bo Pan. Had to be. It was Steve who had changed. In all his years of work, pursuing whatever development he thought might add to the Platypus’s effectiveness, he’d felt invulnerable. He’d felt brilliant. None of that had been real. This, however, was reality: a boat that never sat still, an old man watching his every move, a machine that refused to respond, and a nation’s investment in him about to go bust.

He didn’t feel brilliant anymore. He felt incompetent.

Bo Pan pushed himself up on one arm.

“Steve, it seems you are telling me you don’t know where your creation is, but I know you cannot be telling me that.”

A coldness in that voice, and steel. No sorry, sorry this time. Steve shivered.

“The sensor algorithms determine where the Platypus goes, so it isn’t necessarily moving in a straight line,” he said. “If it has to go around or through anything, that causes delays, and if it sees any American UUVs or divers, it knows to swim away and come back later. Could be any minute now. Or it could be hours. The UUV is programmed to not be seen, Bo Pan. I can’t—”

A laptop let out a beep. Bo Pan sat up straighter. Steve put the chips aside, brushed his orange-dust-covered fingertips against his shirt, then pulled the laptop closer.

A tweet.

Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a crashing waterfall of relief.

“It’s the Platypus,” he said. “It’s signaling.”

He watched a string of tweets come pouring in. Seemingly normal language — mostly about “hot bitches” and “keg stands” — told him the story.

Bo Pan leaned in. “Is it working?”

Steve smiled. “Hell yeah, it is.” The Platypus had found the location. Steve read the tweets, trying to figure out what had taken so long. There it was:

Navy ROVs.

Holy shit, it was really happening.

It wasn’t just the ROVs… the Platypus had found a big object on the bottom. Too big.

“Something is off,” he said. “When the alien object came down, there was enough observed data to calculate its size as roughly equivalent to a small refrigerator, like the kind I had in my dorm. But the Platypus found something exponentially larger.”

Bo Pan nodded slowly. His eyes seemed electric.

“Do you have pictures?”

Steve huffed. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

The old man’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Yes, I have pictures.”

“Show me,” Bo Pan said. “And prepare yourself. There is some other information I have not told you.”

Steve sighed. The old man was being cryptic. Whatever.

That feeling of failure faded away. Steve had done it — he felt strong once again, ready for the next step.

The Platypus couldn’t send straight video. That was too much bandwidth; even if his encryption held, the size of that signal and the location it came from could alert the navy ships to the Platypus’s presence. Instead, his machine took low-bandwidth snapshots — one frame every twenty seconds — and routed each one through a different secure server.

“Here we are,” Steve said, and called them up on the screen.

The first picture showed something green, blurry. That meant it was a pale color, brightly reflecting the low-light camera’s illumination.

“Can’t make that out,” Steve said. “Lemme get the next one.”

He called the image up, and froze: the face and torso of a corpse.

A sailor. A navy sailor.

Puffy face. Black sockets where the eyes had once been, eyes probably eaten by fish that had also picked at the skin, tearing holes and leaving strands of flesh dangling weightless in the water. Body bloated, so swollen it had burst the zipper at the belly and neck, leaving only a bit near the collar still fastened. Pale skin glowed an obscene white-green.

“Bo Pan, what is this?”

“More pictures. Let me see.”

The next image showed a long shape. Gray, perhaps? The one after that, yes, gray, large, maybe ten feet tall or even taller, rising up at an angle. Definitely artificial.

When Steve saw the next picture, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. He realized, finally, just how dangerous this game was.

The gray image rose up at an angle. Flat, with slightly curved sides. At the top, a white, three-digit number glowed a bright green.

The number: 688.

“A submarine sail,” Steve said. “Is that… is that a nuclear sub?”

Bo Pan leaned in closer, so close Steve could smell his unwashed odor. The old man seemed… gleeful.

“The Los Angeles,” Bo Pan said. “There was a battle. It sank.”

Steve hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to understand the situation; when Bo Pan said the word location, Steve had jumped. How naive. How stupid.

The next picture came up. The Platypus was moving closer to the sub. Another corpse. Some kind of bulbous, sausage-shaped metal construct behind the sail, bent and torn, a man-size round door still sealed but the construct itself ripped open. And there, stuck on that jagged metal, a leg — just a leg, no body. Inside the ruined construct, Steve saw an inner hatch sitting open.

This was almost a thousand feet below the surface. Could there be survivors?

“A battle,” Steve said, his voice a husky whisper. “Between who?”

“The Americans. They shot at each other.”

Steve couldn’t think. Why hadn’t he asked more questions?

The final picture showed blackness: the Platypus moving over the submarine to the other side. Then, a wider shot of the sunken ship; from this angle, it looked bent, like a loaf of French bread kinked in the middle. A huge gash marred the hull, metal shards bent violently inward.

Bo Pan pointed to the gash.

“There,” he said. “Can your machine go inside?”

Steve stared. What had happened? Why had the navy destroyed its own vessel? If the navy would slaughter everyone on the Los Angeles, it wouldn’t think twice about sinking the Mary Ellen Moffett. He started to shake. He was in danger. This little excursion might get him killed.

“Steve,” Bo Pan said sharply. “Can it go in inside?”

Steve tried to clear his thoughts, tried to focus. He examined the tear in the hull.

“No, that’s probably not a good spot,” he said. “The metal is too torn up, too jagged. The Platypus could get hooked on a shard, get stuck.”

“Then go back to the picture of the dry deck shelter.”

Steve started to ask what that was, but then he knew — the sausage-shaped construct behind the sail. He called up that image.

“There,” Bo Pan said. “Could it go in there?”

A hole large enough for two men to walk through… the open inner hatch… far enough away from the torpedo damage that the corridors would be flooded, but mostly intact…

But if the Platypus went in and got stuck, and the navy captured it, could any of the advanced tech lead back to Steve? What would happen to him if it did?

“We need to leave this alone,” he said. “The data shows there are American ROVs in the area.”

He felt an iron-hard hand grip his shoulder. Steve’s body scrunched up from the sudden pain.

Bo Pan bent close. When he spoke, Steve felt the old man’s breath on his neck.

“I said, can it go inside.”

“Yes, sure,” Steve said in a rush. “But it’s like a maze in there. Without a deck plan, the Platypus might get stuck. We’d never get her back.”

Bo Pan stood straight, lifted up his bulky Detroit Lions sweatshirt to reach into his jeans pocket — when he did that, Steve saw the handle of a small revolver.

A gun?

Bo Pan had a gun?

Steve realized he was staring, turned quickly to lock his eyes on the laptop screen.

“Steve, what is wrong? You seem startled.”

The tone in Bo Pan’s voice made it clear: I know you saw the gun, and now you know who is really in charge, yes?

“I’m fine, Bo Pan. Fine.”

“Good.”

The old man offered Steve a folded piece of paper.

Steve took it, started unfolding it. Even as he did, he wondered if this might be the end of him. Once he looked at it, would he know too much?

He found himself looking at a detailed deck plan of the USS Los Angeles. Under the title were the words Modified: Operation Wolf Head.

Bo Pan flicked the paper. “This cost your country a great deal of money.” He pointed to the sub’s nose. “There. The Tomahawk missile tubes were removed and a lab was installed.” He slid his finger to a small box with an X drawn on it. “And that is their containment unit. Tell your machine to look there, and bring us whatever is inside.”

Steve turned in his chair, stared at the older man. Bo Pan still looked like some rich white man’s gardener, yet here he was with classified information that had to go way beyond top secret.

“The alien artifact,” Steve said, “that’s what’s inside the containment unit?”

“Hopefully,” Bo Pan said.

“This is a bad idea. The submarine was hit by a torpedo. Even if the alien artifact is inside, it could be broken into a hundred pieces, and each piece might have that contagious disease that turns people into killers. We should just go. The navy will be angry if they find us looking in there, and—”

The slap rocked Steve’s head back. He stared, wide-eyed, hand cupping his now-stinging cheek. He hadn’t even seen Bo Pan move.

The old man stared down at him. “You are wasting time, Steve Stanton. Do you think you are the only intelligent person on the planet? The X on the paper represents a locker, a locker built to withstand a direct hit from almost any kind of weapon. Inside that locker is a piece of alien ship stored within an airtight container that has already been decontaminated. If the locker is not damaged, the container can be brought onto this ship with no danger to any of us.”

The sting of the slap faded to mild heat. Steve gently rubbed at his cheek. It hurt. He’d made a mistake by following orders and not asking questions, but he wouldn’t be bullied into making an even bigger one.

“No,” Steve said. “I’m done with this.” He turned to his laptop, fingers reaching for the keys. “I’m telling the Platypus to return to —”

A cold pressure pushed against his temple. He felt a mechanical click that sent a slight vibration through his skull — Bo Pan had put the revolver against his head and cocked the trigger.

Steve couldn’t move.

“If the container makes it to shore, you make it to shore,” Bo Pan said. “Do you understand?”

Just a pull of the trigger, one tiny motion, and his brains would splatter all over the cabin. Steve stayed oh-so-still, lest a shiver or a twitch make Bo Pan’s finger squeeze.

“Yes, I understand.”

The pressure against his temple went away, leaving the cool spot in its wake.

“Good,” Bo Pan said. “And your other machine, the snake, it can destroy an American ROV?”

The snake had been in the second crate. It hitched a ride on the Platypus the way a remora hitches a ride on a shark. It was made up of nine metal-shelled sections connected together by rubber seals. Each section had a battery-powered motor inside. The nine motors worked in synchronicity to create a waving motion: the three-foot-long robot could slither across land like a snake, or swim through water like an eel.

Each metal-shelled section also held twenty grams of C-4. If the snake swam near a threatening object, it could detonate all nine charges at once.

“Steve, I asked you a question. If it needs to, can the snake destroy an American ROV?”

Steve’s body vibrated with fear.

“Yes, of course,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it could or it couldn’t, but he wasn’t about to say that to an angry old man holding a gun. “If the snake can wrap around one of the navy’s ROVs, it can detonate and crush the thing like a tin can. But if you’re thinking of using it on the locker that holds the alien object, Bo Pan, I can’t guarantee it won’t destroy everything inside.”

Bo Pan shrugged. “The Americans will try to retrieve the container. When they do, they will open the locker for us. That is when your machine will take it. I will tell you what I want it to do. I talk, you program, understand?”

Steve turned to his computer, suddenly relieved to dive into his work, to give his brain something to think of other than Bo Pan’s gun.

THE BARRIER

Clarence sat in the observation module. He watched a monitor, trying to make sense of the video Tim and Margaret were so excited to share with him. It was time-lapse footage, two side-by-side bits of Charlie Petrovsky’s rotting flesh. Five hours compressed into fifteen seconds let Clarence immediately see a significant difference.

He looked over the console, down into the Analysis Module where Tim and Margaret stared up at him, waiting.

“Okay, I watched it,” Clarence said. “The one on the left is rotting faster than the one on the right. What’s it mean?”

Tim turned to Margaret, half bowed, lowered his arm in a sweeping gesture: after you, madame. Margaret mocked a curtsy, which looked ridiculous in her bulky suit.

To say their mood had changed was an understatement; they thought they were on to something big.

“The sample on the left is the control,” Margaret said. “That’s Petrovsky’s tissue, getting hit hard by the black rot. The one on the right is also his tissue but was treated with a solution that contained Walker’s blood.”

Clarence glanced at the footage again. “Walker’s blood stops the black rot?”

This time Margaret turned to Tim, bowed, made the after you gesture. Tim kept form and mocked a curtsy of his own — a little better than Margaret’s, Clarence had to admit.

“Not Walker’s blood, exactly, but a chemical that’s in it,” Tim said. “I found a compound in her blood that wasn’t present in Petrovsky. We then detected that same compound in the few living hydras we have left. Ergo, the hydras make it. The compound is a catalyst that alters the black-rot process — it turns off the part that makes human bodies undergo exponential apoptosis, but it doesn’t do anything to the chemical that makes the infected tissues and microorganisms undergo their own chain-reaction decomposition.”

Clarence had to play back the words in his head to make sure he wasn’t oversimplifying what he’d heard. Could it be that straightforward?

“So it’s a cure,” he said. “It kills the infection, but leaves our tissue alone?”

Tim thought for a moment. “Sort of. It depends on how long the person has been exposed. See, the catalyst is a really big molecule. You know anything about the blood-brain barrier?”

Clarence hesitated for a moment, wondering if Tim was trying to make him look stupid in front of Margaret, but both of them seemed far too excited to be playing any games.

“No, not really.”

“Think of it like a mesh,” Margaret said. “It’s a semipermeable membrane. That means things of a certain size can penetrate it, but things larger than that size cannot. It evolved to keep circulating blood separate from the extracellular fluid” — she paused, perhaps realizing she was going too far into detail — “to keep blood and other things separated from actual brain tissue. Blood can’t go through the barrier, but oxygen diffused from blood can. So if things are small enough, they can slide through the mesh. If they’re too big, they can’t. Follow me so far?”

Clarence nodded.

Tim held out his hands wide, like he was talking about the fish that got away.

“The hydra catalyst is too large to penetrate the barrier,” he said. “So to answer your question, the catalyst first works as an inoculant — if it’s already in your system before you are exposed to the infection, any crawlers produced will die before they can reach your brain. It makes you immune. And if you’ve already been infected but the crawlers have not yet reached your brain, the catalyst can kill off those crawlers. Meaning, if you get infected right now and we get this catalyst in your system within twenty-four hours, it will probably cure you.”

Clarence now understood their excitement. He was beginning to feel it himself.

“So if you take it soon enough, it is a cure,” he said. “What happens after the twenty-four hours?”

Tim shrugged. “The crawlers need about twenty-four hours to form, find your nervous system and reach your brain. If enough of them get in, they rework your brain into the cellulose-based structures we’ve seen. At that point, it’s too late.”

Clarence looked at Margaret. “But you said Walker had hydras in her brain. Hydras can get in there?”

Margaret nodded. “They can, following the same path the crawlers do. We don’t have much evidence to go on right now, but it seems possible the hydras travel to the brain instinctually, because they are so closely related to the crawlers. But there’s a difference — the hydras don’t seem to alter brain tissue. They’re just there.”

As far as cures went, alien organisms in the brain didn’t seem all that encouraging.

“Say the crawlers get to the brain first,” Clarence said. “They start changing everything around, and then the hydras get there. What happens then?”

Margaret glanced at Tim.

“The hydras probably keep secreting their catalyst,” he said. “Since they’re on the other side of the blood-brain barrier, and so are the crawlers, any crawlers exposed to the catalyst will die. Any cellulose-based structures probably dissolve.”

“Which means what to the host?”

“Death,” Tim said. “It means death.”

For a few minutes, Clarence had dared to hope that it was all over, that if some poor soul was infected, he or she could be saved with a shot or a pill. Life didn’t work that way, it seemed. Still, at least now there was something to fight with.

“Impressive work,” Clarence said. “So what happens next?”

“Tim goes to work on genetically sequencing the hydras,” Margaret said. “He isolates the genetic code that makes the catalyst, inserts that bit of code into the genome of his yeast, and the yeast produces the catalyst.”

That sounded impossible.

“Feely, you can really do that?”

Tim shrugged. “It’s how insulin is made for diabetics. The DNA that makes insulin is inserted into bacteria, the bacteria secrete the insulin, which is harvested and purified. When the bacteria reproduce, the subsequent generations have that same inserted DNA. Boom, you have a permanent, insulin-producing population.

“The basic technology is decades old. I’ve spent the last two years inserting crawler coding into my fast-growing yeast, so at this point it’s just plug-and-play. The only question is if my yeast will survive the new coding. If so, we’ll have Saccharomyces feely producing the catalyst inside of a few hours.”

A few hours? Clarence fought down his immediate reaction. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up this fast.

“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “What do you need to make this happen?”

Now Tim glanced at Margaret. She looked away, looked down.

“We need to make more hydras,” she said. “And there’s only one way to do that.”

HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

Margaret had killed one of the hydras to analyze it. Another had died on its own; she assumed the last two surviving hydras couldn’t be far behind.

Time was running out.

Candice Walker was dead, as was everything inside of her. There were no more hydras to be had from her corpse.

Margaret entered the clear cell of Eric Edmund. She carried a small tray holding an alcohol swab and a syringe. She set the tray down on Edmund’s stomach. She had to remind herself that the man was brain-dead. He would never recover.

Edmund’s self, all that he had ever been, that was gone forever… but his body lived on. His heart pumped, his blood flowed, his cells divided. The human body was the hydras’ natural environment. There, hopefully, they would modify Edmund’s stem cells, make copies of themselves — they would replicate.

Margaret picked up the alcohol swab and wiped Edmund’s shoulder, cleaning her target area. She set the swab down and lifted the syringe. She stared at it through her visor. Just one CC of saline, and inside that fluid, a pair of passengers.

Only two left.

A slap on the glass. She turned to see Cantrell, staring at her, the lighter skin of his palms resting on the clear wall. His eyes… he looked like he was trying to control his anger.

“Doctor Montoya, what are you doing?” Cantrell smiled. He looked at the syringe. “Don’t you need permission for something like that?”

How could he know what she was doing? He didn’t know; he was just being difficult.

“Not your concern,” she said.

Cantrell frowned, spoke sweetly. “Awww, Doc, of course it is. He’s in the cell next to mine. What if something breaks? What you do to him could affect me.”

“You have nothing to worry about,” Margaret said. “You’re not infected, Cantrell.”

The smile returned. A chilling smile.

“Then let me out,” he said. “I keep testing negative… just let me out.”

Those eyes, so intense, so angry even though his voice sounded smooth and calm.

Why was she wasting time with him?

Only two left…

Margaret slid the needle into Edmund’s shoulder, then pushed the plunger all the way down. The saline emptied into his arm.

That was that. She could only hope those hydras were as reproductively efficient as the crawlers that had taken over Betty Jewel, Carmen Sanchez and so many others.

All Margaret’s energy drained away. She felt hollow. The biosafety suit suddenly seemed so heavy. If she could just get out of it for a little bit, maybe rest her eyes.

She heard the click of someone coming onto her channel.

“Margo,” Clarence said. “Where are you?”

“Detainment.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m working, Clarence. What do you want?”

“The diver is going into the Los Angeles in forty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d want to watch.”

She did want to see that. Maybe the diver would come across the subject of Candice Walker’s final drawings, the three men in the membrane. Forty-five minutes… enough time to decon, get out of the suit, grab twenty minutes of sleep.

She turned to leave, felt Cantrell’s eyes upon her. For just a moment, she froze — he looked like he wanted to kill her — and then the moment was gone.

Cantrell walked to his bed and sat.

Margaret picked up her tray and left Edmund’s cell.

FOLLOW-THROUGH

When he’d been ten years old, Orin Nagy’s father finally showed him how to properly swing a baseball bat. It was all in the hips, his father had said. Twisting them at the right moment brought your body around, maximized your swing velocity. Arm strength mattered, sure, but the real power came from the hips. The hips, and following through.

The same advice held true for swinging a pipe wrench.

Orin swung, Orin twisted, bringing twenty pounds of unforgiving metal to bear on the motherfucker that wanted to make him take the cellulose test.

The man’s biosafety suit offered little protection. The heavy wrench caved in his right temple like a hammer slammed into a ripe melon.

And, just like the good boy he’d once been, Orin followed through.

The man dropped like a bag of wet shit.

Daddy would have been proud.

Orin heard men screaming angry things. He saw another one raising a pistol. Orin let the follow-through carry him all the way around in a fast 360-degree turn. As he came out of that turn, he swung again, more overhand axe-chop than smooth baseball swing. The results were much the same: the wet crunch of a crushed skull.

The gun went off. A pair of bodies slammed into Orin, dragged him to the ground.

He fought, because God commanded he do so, and also because before he died he wanted to kill just one more of the cock-sucking pissant humans that he hated so fucking much…

140 CHARACTERS

Six miles clear of the navy flotilla and fifty feet below the empty, roiling surface of Lake Michigan, the Platypus hovered, motionless save for the slight back-and-forth tug of the waves high above. It might have been a dead fish. It might have been a log.

A clamp released, freeing a fist-sized piece of plastic. The plastic floated upward, trailed by a thin cable. Forty feet… thirty… twenty…

The plastic reached the surface, bobbed there. It extended a telescoping antenna that was no thicker than a pencil at the base, little more than a stiff wire where it topped out four feet above the water.

The Platypus floated, unmoving, waiting for instructions.

A signal came in: a tweet. Then another. Five 140-character alphanumeric messages in all. Each message called up commands stored in the Platypus’s memory.

The Platypus retracted the antennae, then reeled in the plastic float. The machine tilted down, started to swim. A hundred feet down, then two hundred, then three hundred.

Ten feet from the bottom, the Platypus leveled out. It called up the recorded bearing that would lead it back to the Los Angeles. It followed the lake floor’s contour, going deeper and deeper as it closed the distance.

The Platypus scanned for any signal, any communication, ready to adjust its path based on the presence of other craft.

A half mile out, it detected pings from a powerful sonar almost a thousand feet above: signals from a surface ship sent to submerged vessels. The Platypus couldn’t read those messages — they were encrypted — but the signals themselves alerted it to a danger of detection.

Steve Stanton’s creation slowed to a crawl. It sank to the bottom, resting its underside on Lake Michigan’s thick muck. It used its side fins as arms rather than paddles, pressing against rocks and sand and mud to pull its body slowly forward.

It detected light, light coming from yellow shapes. The Platypus stopped moving, ran the visual data through pattern analysis programs. It quickly identified the shapes as U.S. Navy ROVs.

The Platypus shut down everything but its detection systems.

Eventually, the yellow shapes moved away, away and up, taking their light with them. When that light dropped below a certain level, the Platypus started a timing subroutine. If the light didn’t come back after four minutes, it would proceed.

Infrared cameras searched and found none of the moving objects it was programmed to avoid. Sonar continued to sweep the area, but the Platypus’s furry foam coating absorbed those signals, let almost nothing bounce away. What little echo escaped would show as nothing more than a fish.

The Platypus moved forward again, slinking across the bottom toward its goal.

So far, the machine had done nothing remarkable: Move toward an obstacle; search for unobstructed space; enter unobstructed space; repeat while moving toward the preprogrammed target location. To a robotics engineer, such maneuvers were child’s play, part of freshman robotics classes — high school freshman classes, that is.

The Platypus swam closer to the Los Angeles. Lined up next to the 362 feet of the wrecked sub, Steve Stanton’s 10-foot-long, narrow robot kind of did look like a fish. A tiny fish.

Rear fins undulated slowly, pushing the Platypus toward the crack in the dry deck shelter. Small internal motors activated, pulling the machine’s sides in tighter. As it slid through the crack, it hit something soft — the severed leg that had once belonged to Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

From the black shoe, which was still tied, up to midthigh, the leg looked normal. Wet, but normal. From the midthigh up, however, it was a study in damage. A jagged shard of bone stuck up from streamers of pale, bloodless muscle. The impact with the Platypus made Charlie’s leg spin in a slow-motion circle, shreds of tissue marking the curve like morbid little comet tails.

Just as the Platypus moved past, the fleshy mass of Charlie’s thigh spun into the sonar-eating foam, kicking up a small cloud of Charlie meat that danced in the robot’s wake.

The leg bounced away.

The Platypus moved to the open hatch that Bo Pan had spotted several hours earlier. In it went. It swam past motionless bodies, moved around wreckage, squeezed through doors that had been bent and torn by a torpedo’s lethal shock wave.

Steve Stanton’s creation quickly found the submarine’s nose. It entered. It located the locker that stored its objective. Recent programming told the Platypus to wait here, wait for someone or something to come and open that locker.

It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.

The Platypus flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.

A threat, or, an opportunity.

For the second time, the Platypus shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.

It watched.

SCARY PERRY

She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.

“Hello, Perry.”

Perry Dawsey smiled.

They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.

They had touched Perry.

He was going to die. He knew that.

“Hey, Margo,” he said.

“Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.

“I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but… I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

I’ve got those things inside of me, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was: again. What he hadn’t said was: It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway.

His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.

“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”

They: the crawlers that were already working their way up his nervous system, heading for his head. There, they would spread their interweaving tendrils. They would take him over, change him, and destroy who he was in the process.

“You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”

And now her gift to him, his reward for standing tall in the face of absolute destruction, for being the one person willing to fight no matter what the odds.

She heard a growing whistle — the sound of an incoming artillery shell. A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.

Perry stared at her. His smile returned, a smile of exhausted disbelief.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Are you nuking me?”

“Yes,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.

The shadow-circle grew larger, engulfing their feet, then spreading until they were both standing in its shade.

A wet laugh joined Perry’s corpse smile. “Dew said I’m like a cockroach, that nothing can kill me. I don’t think physics is on my side this time, though.”

He was dead twice over, yet still he cracked jokes, for her, a last effort to lift some of the blame from her shoulders.

Perry coughed. Little hatchlings shot out of his mouth, fell to the ground. They righted themselves and sprinted away, out of the shadow and into the light.

They wouldn’t escape. Nothing would.

Perry wiped his mouth. His blue eyes bore into her.

“How long do I have?”

“About fifteen seconds,” she said.

Then she started to float away, leaving Perry behind.

He looked up. “No shit? That’s kind of fucked up.”

The bomb’s shadow spread faster, throwing the buildings on either side of the street into deep blackness. Perry stood in the shadow’s center, his blond hair and blue eyes still as bright as if the sun reached down and set them alight.

Margaret floated higher. Perry looked smaller and smaller.

He cupped his hands to his face and shouted: “Margo?”

Shooting up into the sky, she shouted back: “Yes?”

She saw the bomb now — as big as the city itself, a cartoony thing that would crush Detroit by impact alone even if it didn’t detonate.

Perry drew in a huge breath, and screamed his final words.

“Thank you for saving my life!”

The giant bomb exploded. The mushroom cloud rose up far beneath her feet. It wouldn’t reach her. She wouldn’t feel the effects.

She was safe: it was only other people who died.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Margaret Montoya opened her eyes. She’d failed Perry. She’d failed Dew Phillips. She’d failed Amos Braun.

She sat up in bed, trying to remember where she was. A bed, clean sheets that smelled faintly of bleach, heavy blankets… her room aboard the Carl Brashear.

A nap, a short nap that had done nothing to ease her exhaustion.

She wanted to watch the diver go into the Los Angeles, but she could barely move. Maybe it was time to take Tim up on his offer for Adderall. She’d had four hours of sleep in the last twenty — every hour of sleep was a lost hour of analysis and research.

Margaret pushed herself out of bed. She could watch the diver’s efforts while she waited for the initial results from Tim’s yeast modification. Saccharomyces feely. That was the answer, it had to be.

The hydras were a fascinating development, but largely unknown. What effect would they have on a living host? They might wind up being as bad as — or worse than — the crawlers that they killed. Tim had found his living hydras inside pustules on Walker; that was one way the crawlers spread. Would the hydras also puff out, microscopic bits floating on the air until they landed on a new host?

If so, the hydras could become an airborne contagion.

Tim’s yeast, on the other hand, carried no such threat. He’d ramped up the growth rate somehow, making it reproduce two to three times faster than most yeast. It wasn’t contagious — and even if it was, it was just yeast with a piece of the hydra’s coding: no threat of any kind. Still, she had sent Murray a message to look into the Spectrum Health HAC study. If one participant in that study produced hydras, other participants might as well. She couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility that could provide a potential weapon.

Margaret stood. She felt old, she felt creaky. She’d watch the diver, then maybe take one of Tim’s pills.

Tired or not, the work wouldn’t wait.

POSITIVE THOUGHTS

Tim Feely walked down the white corridor, toweling off his hair as he went. Amazing what a shower could do for the soul. His flip-flops flapped against the floor. He wore a thick, white, terrycloth robe, a gift from Captain Yasaka. That poor, poor woman; she commanded an entire ship’s worth of sailors, day in, day out, but sometimes a girl just needed someone else to take charge.

Tim wondered if Margaret Montoya was that kind of woman in the bedroom. Or did her boudoir policies stray into the dictatorial realm? He certainly couldn’t see Clarence Otto as the kind of guy who let his lady boss him around. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Margaret was too aggressive for Tall, Dark & Don’t Threaten My Manhood. If Margo wanted to call the shots, that wouldn’t bother Tim in the least.

If the ladies liked it, Tim liked it — a simple philosophy that opened up a world of possibilities.

Could he land Margaret? Why the fuck not? He felt on top of the world, he felt like a king. He’d isolated the hydra’s catalyst-producing gene sequence and inserted it into his fast-growing yeast, which was now happily diving away. It remained to be seen, however, if the modified yeast actually produced the catalyst, and if that catalyst actually worked.

From everything he’d seen so far, it would. Which meant — Tim Feely might very well have just saved the world.

And if that don’t get you laid, nothing will.

Tim entered the briefing room. Margaret was sitting in one of the room’s ten theater-style chairs. Clarence stood off a bit to the side. He’d lost the suit coat, thank God. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. A T-shirt that was too tight, in Tim’s opinion. Well, maybe Margaret was tired of all those muscles. Fuck but that Clarence dude was put together, though.

Margaret saw Tim enter, raised her glass of wine. “Doctor Feely. I found the liquor cabinet and helped myself. You don’t mind?”

He gave her his best seductive smile. “Don’t mind at all.”

Clarence saw the smile. He scowled.

Tim dialed the smile back a few notches, from leering to slightly-more-than-friendly.

Margaret gestured to the room, clearly hoping to change the subject. “This theater is really something.”

Tim could imagine how the room took newbies by surprise. In addition to cushy seats that faced a ten-foot screen, there was a fridge full of beer, plenty of snacks, and a liquor cabinet packed with the best liquid treats a boy could buy.

“Don’t forget there was a full staff here for years,” he said. “Uncle Sam wanted his pet scientists to be happy.”

Clarence let out a snort. “Yeah. And the people who actually do the work of running the ship? What do they think of your little private theater?”

Tim waggled his pointer finger side to side. “Please to no-no-no,” he said. “The entire science module is off-limits to the rank and file. I doubt people who hot-bunk would appreciate we brainiacs living in the lap of luxury.”

“Right,” Clarence said. “That doesn’t bother you at all?”

Tim walked past Clarence to the liquor cabinet. The half-empty bottle of Adderall was right on top. Correction, half-full: Tim was an optimist, after all. He opened the cabinet and pulled out the bottle of Oban 2000.

“Clarence,” Tim said as he poured a glass, “it’s not my fault other people didn’t get a doctorate.”

“No, I suppose it’s not,” Clarence said. “Just like it’s not your fault that you get to live in freedom.”

This guy had to have an American flag tattooed somewhere on his body.

Margaret waved a hand. “Boys, don’t rain on my parade with your political differences, okay? If Tim’s yeast culture takes off, we may very well have this thing beat. I’m in the mood to enjoy my break, because soon we have to get back to work.”

Tim nodded. “I agree. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”

Margaret shook her head. “I’m talking about tonight, Doctor Feely. As soon as we watch the diver enter the Los Angeles, we’ll get back at it.”

Tim had a moment to hope she was joking. The look in her eyes said she wasn’t.

“Ah,” he said. “I see.”

Good thing he had enough stimulants to go around. Better living through chemistry.

He sat in the chair next to Margaret, feeling Clarence’s stare on the back of his neck as he did. Tim sipped his Oban.

The image on the big screen showed a cone of dimly lit water, featureless save for an occasional bit of flotsam that glowed like a tiny star in the diver’s light, then gone as the camera passed it by. Numbers played out at the bottom of the screen, showing the descending depth: eight hundred feet and counting. Another hundred feet or so, and that light would play off the wreck of the Los Angeles.

Up until the shit hit the fan, Tim had spent most of his time in this very room, watching downloaded movies and TV shows, playing video games, just generally dicking around and wasting taxpayer money. What else had there been to do? Sure, he’d worked on his yeast, trying to engineer a genome that would successfully produce a little-understood cellulase. Trying, and failing; he’d had no crawlers, no samples, nothing to go on but a mass spec analysis that clearly wasn’t 100 percent accurate. He’d collected a six-figure paycheck, come up with bullshit to put on his weekly reports and generally kicked back and lived the good life of a government employee flying under the radar.

Now, however, he had something he could use: an actual cellulase, and plenty of it. On the one hand, it made him furious to see how close he’d been to getting it right. On the other, if the new line of Saccharomyces feely succeeded, his work could make the human race immune to a disease that made the black plague look like postnasal drip.

Tim raised his glass toward Margaret. She frowned, but begrudgingly reached out her wineglass and clinked in a quiet toast.

Like him, she had showered. Her black hair hung heavy and damp, but she looked fantastic. When she’d arrived, she’d been drowning in a bizarre notion of self-pity. Well, no more — her eyes blazed with intelligence, with life, and a persistent smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. She looked good even inside a BSL-4 suit; outside of one, she looked fantastic.

Tim could see more than a few lost weekends with that one. As long as Captain Yasaka didn’t find out, of course. It was always a good rule of thumb not to incur the jealousy of a woman with keys to the weapons locker.

“I should make popcorn,” Tim said. “You guys want popcorn?”

Neither Margaret nor Clarence responded. Their attention stayed fixed on the screen.

The number at the bottom of the screen ticked up to 850.

“The diver will be there soon,” Tim said. “We’ll get a look at this debacle.”

“It’s not the diver,” Clarence said. “This is from a camera mounted on the nose of a Blackfish 12, the navy’s high-end UUV. The ’Fish is going down ahead of the diver to get a fresh rad reading.”

Tim drained his glass. He thought about asking Clarence to fetch him a refill, but he wasn’t really in the mood to get his ass kicked. He started to stand.

Margaret put a hand on his arm. “Doctor Feely, you’re not getting another drink, are you?”

Tim stopped halfway out of his chair. “Uh, the thought had crossed my mind.”

She shook her head. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t. We go back into the lab in a little bit.”

Tim sighed, sat down and watched the screen. The Blackfish’s lights played against a far-off, ghostly image. Finally, the submarine.

His hand tightened on his empty glass. The submarine… Walker, immune…

“Wait a minute,” he said. “We think Walker was immune, right?”

Margaret nodded.

“So then why did she sabotage the sub’s engines? Why did she cripple it if she wasn’t a psycho?”

“The answer is simple,” Clarence said. “Maybe not for someone with a doctorate, but simple enough for a veteran.”

Tim turned to look at Clarence, saw the man’s self-confident smirk.

“Do tell, Agent Otto,” Tim said. “Edify me with your worldly wisdom.”

“The disease wants to spread, it always wants to spread,” Clarence said. “If the captain was one of the Converted, he’d head for the nearest major port so he could spread his infected crew among a dense population.”

Margaret’s eyebrows rose. “Chicago. They were heading for Chicago. Candice stopped them.”

Clarence nodded. “Lieutenant Walker knew her duty. She knew what she had to do to protect the country.”

Tim huffed. Clarence was right, obviously, which Tim found annoying.

Patriotism could drive people to sacrifice themselves. That, too, was damn annoying, because it flew in the face of survival of the fittest. Stupid people could be convinced to die for the greater good. The greater good was always someone who would live on because of — and long after — that sacrifice. Soldiers die, generals retire.

On the screen, the wrongly angled sail of the Los Angeles loomed into view. Lights played off more flotsam. Tim knew a lot of that detritus was composed of sailor bits, bodies either torn apart by the torpedo strike or picked at by scavengers.

The number 688 glowed a bright white.

The PA system clicked on: a too-loud, mechanical voice that broke the moment’s magic.

“Doctor Feely, line one for Captain Yasaka. Doctor Feely, line one for Captain Yasaka.”

Tim glanced at the wet-haired Margaret Montoya, felt like he’d been caught at something — did Yasaka know he was ogling his fellow scientist? He stood and strode to a phone mounted on the wall. He lifted the handset, as always marveling a little at the archaic cord that ran from it to the wall unit.

He pushed the number “1.”

“This is Doctor Feely.”

“This is the captain.” Yasaka’s voice. Not the voice that on some nights said take me, or on extraspecial nights said please, Daddy. This was her command voice.

“Captain, how can I be of service?”

“Are you with Doctor Montoya?”

“I am.”

“A petty officer just killed two of my crew,” the captain said. “He tested positive, as did two other men who were bunking near him. We have a total of three positives.”

Tim’s body went ice cold.

“Three… positives?”

“So far,” Yasaka said. “Security will deliver these men to cells in your lab. I suspect they won’t be the last.”

DIVER DOWN

Clarence sat in the lab’s control room module, looking down at Tim and Margaret who were working away in their big-helmeted suits.

They’d rushed out of the extravagant theater, desperate to get back to work. Clarence had watched them both pop some pills — apparently, now wasn’t the time to let fatigue get the better of them.

As for himself, he’d suited up and overseen delivery of the new prisoners: Orin Nagy, the killer, as well as Conroy Austin and Lionel Chappas, both of whom had tested positive. Cantrell now had company.

The deck crane had lowered the men down to the Brashear’s big side airlock, accompanied by six biosafety-suited guards. Clarence had watched everyone go through the bleach-wash decon process, watched the infected men be placed in clear cells, watched the guards reenter the airlock for their final decon.

The side airlock was the only safe way to bring the infected into the holding area, but it was also needed for the submersion tests on Clark’s and Cantrell’s suits. The first test, the pressurized fall test, hadn’t detected any leaks; if the suits had holes, those holes were microscopic. Margaret didn’t seem that concerned about it, but Clarence would still push Captain Yasaka to do the submersion test. With Yasaka’s crew redoubling efforts to find any infected, the best Clarence could hope for was to see the test run tomorrow night, or, at the very latest, the following morning.

The mood had changed, to say the least. In the extravagant briefing room, he’d sensed Margaret’s subdued elation — she thought they had the infection beat. Not today, of course, but so soon that a few more weeks would make no difference. Now, however, the infection had spread to the general crew. Three positives would quickly multiply. Yasaka’s best efforts couldn’t stop the spread, not with so many people packed on the Brashear and nowhere to send them. The captain could only hope to slow the contagion, give Margaret and Tim time to come up with a solution.

And if they didn’t find that solution? This would end with an F-27 Eagle dropping a firebomb on the entire task force. Carl Brashear would join the Forrest Sherman, the Stratton and the Los Angeles at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Would Clarence and Margaret still be aboard if that happened? Maybe. If Murray Longworth wasn’t sure that he and Margaret were clean, he’d torch them without a second thought.

Clarence couldn’t do anything to help Tim and Margaret. What he could do was pay attention to the diver entering the wreck of the Los Angeles.

On the counter in front of him, Clarence had diagrams of the Los Angeles’s layout. He watched the diver’s progress on the console’s small screens. It was quite different from the deep-water dives he’d seen on the Discovery Channel: no rust, no colorful clusters of barnacles and anemones, no schools of bright fish. The LA had sunk only three days earlier — just a broken, gray hull sitting on a lifeless lake bottom.

The control room’s speakers carried the chatter between the diver and the Brashear’s crew.

“Diver One, status? How you doing, Tom?”

“Diver is okay,” came back the answer. “Goddamn cold down here, feeling it in my joints right through the suit. Request permission to start cutting.”

“Permission granted, Diver One.”

Seconds later, the screen blared brightly. Clarence looked away.

The diver’s awkward high-pressure diving suit made him look like a cross between a morbidly obese man and a heavily armored beetle. Five round, blue segments made up each arm, connected together by oscillating rings that allowed limited movement. There weren’t even hands, just blue spheres tipped by black pincers.

The legs were similar to the arms, all connecting to a white, hard-shelled torso, as did the bulbous helmet. A boxy red backpack housed the oxygen supply and CO₂ scrubber, which could give the diver up to forty-eight hours of life support. An ADS rig was one of the few things that could make a space suit look dainty by comparison.

The suit was far too bulky to fit through any of the Los Angeles’s external hatches. Cutting directly into the nose cone might put the alien artifact at risk. The diver would use an underwater torch to cut through the hull of the torpedo room, then move through that wider space into the nose cone.

The bright light faded from the screen.

“Diver One, cut complete. Removing hull.”

Clarence saw a large, oval piece of metal drop away from the submarine’s curved hull and thump into the lake bottom, kicking up a slow-motion cloud of flotsam.

“Diver One, proceed into the torpedo room.”

“Roger that, Topside. Moving into the torpedo room.”

Clarence inched closer to the screen.

Almost immediately, the diver’s light revealed three uniformed corpses that hung motionless in the water. Rigor held arms away from bodies, as if the dead were waiting to give someone a hug. There was at least some animal life at this depth — even though no fish were visible, the ripped flesh of hands and faces betrayed their presence.

“Topside,” the diver said, “you seeing this?” His voice sounded tinny. Clarence could hear the man’s breathing increase.

“Roger that, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Nobody said it was going to be pretty. You’re almost there. Just get the job done.”

“Roger,” the diver said. “Moving in.”

Clarence could imagine the diver’s stress. Nine hundred feet below the surface — a depth that would kill him without the suit — he was surrounded by corpses while violence and uncertainty swept across the ship above him. The diver, Tom, he had to have giant balls of steel.

Technically, Clarence was the current representative of the scientific team. If needed, he had an override button he could hit and speak directly to the diver. If any major issues popped up, Clarence could route the diver-cam view to Margaret’s heads-up display, let her decide what needed to be done.

The dive master’s voice sounded loud and clear in the speakers. “Diver One, move forward through the torpedo room to the nose-cone airlock.”

“Roger that, Topside.”

“Diver Two,” the dive master said, “position yourself at the entrance point and maintain safety of Diver One’s umbilical.”

“Diver Two, confirmed,” came a third voice, the voice of a woman.

Of course they were using a safety diver. Oddly, that made Clarence nervous — the Brashear only had two ADS 2000 rigs. If something went very wrong on this dive, there was no way to get another person down to the wreck without flying in additional suits. Even on a rush order, that might take a day or more.

“Topside, Diver Two,” the woman said. “Feeding Diver One’s umbilical.”

The ADS onboard air meant the divers didn’t need air tubes. What they did need, however, was a communication cable a thousand feet long — if Tom cut his on some jagged piece of wreckage, the Brashear would lose his visual and audio signals.

On the screen, Clarence saw racks of long, gray torpedoes. A body sat there, ass on the deck, back against one of the racks, chin hanging to chest as if the man was only taking a catnap.

“Topside, Diver One,” the diver said. “I have reached the nose-cone airlock. It’s open.”

Clarence looked at the sub’s schematics. The nose cone had a small external airlock, for loading material from the outside directly into the negatively pressurized minilab, and it also had an internal airlock, allowing the science crew to enter the lab from the ship proper.

“We see it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed.”

The images on the screen blurred: the diver turning, slowly pulling in the slack on his umbilical cord. He turned again, then stepped through the airlock door into the small area beyond.

The room looked tilted, of course, about a thirty-degree slant down and to the right. Every wall had racks. Most of the racks were empty — they had been meant to hold small, airtight cases, cases that now bobbed against the ceiling. The cases held various scientific equipment: microscopes, voltage meters, hardness-testing kits and a dozen other devices that might help in identifying alien material.

“Topside, no bodies here, room is empty,” the diver said. “Moving toward the objective.”

He turned to the right, his light moving past the empty racks.

Clarence saw something. He slapped at his “override” button.

“Wait! Look left again!”

The dive master’s voice came back angry and impatient. “Who’s on this goddamn channel?”

“This is Agent Clarence Otto. Sorry. Listen, Tom… I mean, Diver One… can you turn to the left again?”

The dive master spoke again. “Diver One, stand by! Agent Otto, this is dangerous work. We finish the recovery first. Diver, stay with the mission par—”

A no-bullshit female voice cut in. “This is Captain Yasaka. Facilitate any and all requests of Agent Otto, as long as those requests do not compromise diver safety.”

Clarence waited through a short but uncomfortable pause.

“Aye-aye, Captain,” the dive master said. “Diver One, do as Agent Otto asked.”

“Roger that, Chief,” Tom said. “Diver turning left.”

The image on the screen slewed left again.

“Look down,” Clarence said.

The diver did. The image of a black shoe appeared.

“Just a shoe,” Tom said. “It’s stuck in some kind of brown stuff, looks like sediment has leaked in through a crack somewhere.”

Clarence remembered when Murray had come to his house, remembered the picture drawn by Candice Walker.

“Move closer,” Clarence said. “Pan up a little bit.”

“Diver moving closer,” Tom said. “I don’t… wait, I think there’s a foot in that shoe, and the leg is buried in the… oh my God. Are you guys seeing this?”

“Uh… roger that,” the dive master said. “Stand by.”

Clarence leaned closer to the monitor. Wedged between a pair of equipment racks was a body. Unlike the sitting-down-and-napping body in the torpedo room, however, this one was encased in something, something attached to the hull, the deck, even crusted up over the equipment racks. Tom’s light played off of a brown, bumpy surface that covered the unknown sailor’s torso and half of his face while leaving the mouth and nose unobstructed. The right eye stared, wide and forever frozen open. A left hand stuck out from the brown mass, fingers curled in a talon of death, just a bit of blue shirtsleeve still visible. Clarence saw a second left hand — there were two people in there. At least. Just as in the drawing made by Candice Walker.

“Diver One to Topside, what the hell is this?”

Tom’s voice sounded ragged, like he was becoming overwhelmed.

“Ignore it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed to your objective. Tom, stay cool.”

Clarence could barely blink, barely breathe. Tom again turned right, toward the room’s main storage locker. It looked like a horizontal, flat-topped freezer, the kind usually kept in a basement, only this one was military gray instead of the white. Inside, Clarence knew, was the soda-can-sized object the Los Angeles crew had collected days earlier.

Tom moved slowly toward it.

On the locker, a tiny keypad glowed green — it had its own power supply, which was obviously still functioning.

“Topside to Diver One, great work, we’re almost home. Prepare to enter access codes.” The dive master read off the sixteen-digit code. Tom read it back. Clarence saw Tom extend his suit’s pincer hand. The pincer ended with a stiff rubber stud, small enough to press the keypad digits.

The last button drew a beep from the crate, audible over the speakers. The keypad’s glow shifted from green to orange.

The crate’s lid slowly rose on a rear hinge, pushed up by steel pistons on either end. The diver’s lights shone on a small, black, cylindrical container. It wasn’t much bigger than a travel mug.

Hidden inside of that, a piece of an alien spacecraft.

“Topside, Diver One, I see the objective.”

“Visual confirmed, Diver One. Retrieve the objective and then exit the vessel.”

The hard blue spheres — inside of which were Tom’s hands — reached into the crate, toward the objective. The black pincers opened wide, ready to grab the black tube, then paused.

“Diver One to Topside, I know I was briefed that this is safe, but… well, are you sure?”

“Diver One, retrieve the object,” the dive master said. “It’s safe, Tom, just don’t pretend you’re making a James Bond martini, okay?”

Tom actually laughed, a sound thinned by the electronics but still full of a grateful relief.

“Yeah, shaken not stirred, you got it.”

The diver’s pincers closed on the container, rubber grips locking down on the curved, black surface. He lifted it free of the storage locker.

“Topside, Diver One — objective acquired.”

Something black darted across the screen, a split-second flash that made Clarence think of snakes, worms, eels.

The image on the screen shifted, blurred, the diver turning as fast as he could.

“What the fuck was that?” Tom’s voiced peaked his microphone, making his words crackle with static.

“Diver One, calm down,” the dive master said, his tone cool and collected — of course it was, he wasn’t the one in a dark tomb nine hundred feet below the surface, surrounded by dead bodies.

Clarence’s hands clenched into involuntary fists. He wanted to reach down and somehow grab Tom, drag the diver to safety.

The image skewed as Tom turned, looking for the source of that unknown movement. His lights lit up the same empty shelves and slightly bobbing boxes, the same motionless dead men covered in crusty brown.

“Topside, Diver One — I think I saw something moving in here, maybe a fish. Moving to exit the… it’s on my suit! Goddamit, there’s not supposed to be—”

The screen turned to white noise.

“Diver One, status?”

No answer.

Clarence closed his eyes, tried to stay calm. So close… what had happened?

He heard the dive master’s disembodied voice in the control room’s speakers. “Diver One, status? Talk to me, Tom.”

There was no response.

“Diver Two, we’ve lost contact with Diver One,” the dive master said, his voice still supremely composed, infuriatingly so. “Proceed inside immediately to Diver One’s location. Move forward with caution — it’s possible Diver One tripped a booby trap.”

“Topside, Diver Two, entering the sub.”

The dive master continued to calmly issue orders, sending the remaining UUVs to the Los Angeles and getting rescue divers into the water.

The image on Clarence’s screens shifted from static to the entrance hole and then the torpedo room, the view of Diver Two’s camera nearly an exact replay of what Diver One had seen just minutes earlier.

Suddenly, the image shook violently, filled with bubbles and bits of falling metal. The diver slewed right, making the view tilt.

“Topside! Large explosion in the nose cone! Wreck is unstable!”

“Diver Two, exit immediately. Repeat, exit immediately.”

Clarence heard the diver scream, saw a flash of something coming down from above. The image slewed the other way, the horizontal now vertical and the vertical horizontal as the diver fell to her side. He heard a crunching sound, painfully loud in the speakers.

“Diver Two, get out of there,” the dive master said, his voice at last carrying a shred of urgency, a hint of emotion. “Exit immediately.”

“Topside… I’m stuck… oh my God, my visor is cracked, water is coming in, get me help, get someone down here—”

Another crunch far louder than the first, then, no sound at all.

The sideways view didn’t waver. The diver had been crushed, but her helmet camera remained on, continued to send signals up the umbilical to the Brashear far above.

Clarence sagged back in his chair. He felt cold, distant, as if it were all happening somewhere else. Two divers dead. Both ADSs destroyed.

And, worst of all, the artifact was still down there.

Murray hated the Situation Room, but at least that felt comfortable, felt familiar. The president’s private sitting room didn’t feel familiar at all. He’d been here twice before, both times to deliver bad news to former presidents; the kind of news that couldn’t wait until morning.

The room could have been in any house, really, any house of someone with money and status. Murray and Admiral Porter sat on a comfortable couch. Murray knew he looked wrinkled, disheveled — he’d been napping on a cot when the news had come in. His staff had brought him fresh clothes, but he’d done little more than throw them on. Porter, of course, looked neat and pressed, not a wrinkle on his uniform.

The sitting room was right next to the president’s bedroom. Blackmon seemed sleepy, which was no surprise — she’d been woken up only fifteen minutes earlier.

“An explosion,” she said. “What was the cause, Admiral?”

“Unknown at this time,” Porter said. “Possibly sabotage, a booby trap left by the infected crew of the Los Angeles.”

Blackmon’s tired eyes turned to Murray. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s a possibility, Madam President,” Murray said. “Once the LA’s engines blew, the infected crew could assume that sooner or later divers would come down to retrieve the artifact. Booby traps fit the mentality of the infected, to some degree, although the infected would be most interested in spreading the disease. The explosion was definitely internal, however, which does make crew sabotage the most-likely cause.”

He stood — slowly, his aching hips and a stabbing pain in his back keeping him from doing it otherwise — and handed the president a photo taken by one of the Blackfish UUVs. The front end of the Los Angeles had blown open like some cartoon cigar.

Blackmon studied it. “Admiral, would that destroy the artifact?”

“Possibly,” Porter said. “The last report from the diver said he had removed it from the main, hardened storage locker. If that is accurate, it’s doubtful the smaller container holding the artifact itself could have withstood such an explosion.”

Blackmon set the picture in her lap. “When will we know for sure?”

“Another ADS is en route,” Porter said. “It will be at least twelve hours before we can get a person down there. The UUVs have scanned the area, but found no sign of the container. Considering the damage, that’s not surprising.”

She looked at the photo again. “Could it have been survivors? The Los Angeles also had one of those deep-sea suits, did it not? That, or someone in an air pocket? Or could the disease modify human biology enough for people to survive down there?”

Porter shook his head. “Not likely. At that depth, the pressure is twenty-eight times that of sea level — nitrogen narcosis would quickly kill anyone not locked into a sealed area or wearing an ADS. Those suits have at most forty-eight hours of life support, and the Los Angeles sank four days ago. Any normal human being in that crew is definitely dead.”

Porter looked at Murray to answer the final part of the question.

“The disease can change physiology, but not to that extent,” Murray said. “Pressure is still pressure, Madam President.”

She nodded. “All right. Now for the obvious question — could this have been a deliberate attack by foreign agents, allowing them to seize the artifact?”

Murray had known that question was coming. Truth be told, he wanted to hear the answer himself.

Porter thought carefully before responding.

“It’s absolutely a possibility, although less likely than the booby trap. Recon flights are out around the clock. Coast Guard ships have been called in to patrol the five-mile perimeter around the task force. It is highly doubtful any sub could swim undetected beneath that perimeter, and nothing on the surface could get past it unseen. The Pinckney reported no sonar sightings, nothing was detected by the UUVs and ROVS, and neither of the deceased divers reported anything unusual until they entered the nose cone.”

Murray wasn’t a naval expert, but Porter seemed confident in the measures taken.

Blackmon eased back in her chair. “So, sabotage,” she said. “That’s the most likely answer. But if something did get through our lines…”

She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

“Every agency is on alert,” Porter said. “Homeland, TSA, everyone. Not that this changes anything — they’ve been on alert since the Los Angeles went down.”

Murray had his doubts. Anyone talented enough, resourceful enough, to snatch an artifact from nine hundred feet down — right out from under the nose of the U.S. Navy — would have no problem getting past airport security, or just putting the thing on a truck and sending it to Mexico.

At any point on any path of transport, infection could occur.

“Well,” Blackmon said, “for once, I find myself rooting for sabotage.”

Murray couldn’t agree more.

WELCOME ABOARD

Ten clear cells. Four empty. Six occupied.

Three new subjects. Margaret tried to think about them in those terms, as subjects. But unless Tim’s cellulase-secreting yeast acted like some kind of miracle cure, those men were death-row inmates.

She stood in the airlock that led from the lab space to the containment area. She looked through the door’s window, stared at the men in the cells. Clarence stood on her right, Tim on her left. They quietly waited for her to think things through.

Thirty hours since she and Clarence had landed on the Carl Brashear. Barely more than a day, and things were already collapsing.

The men in the clear cells weren’t alone — two positives had been found on the Pinckney, the infected men discovered because they opened fire on their shipmates, killing three and wounding two. Unlike the Brashear, however, the Pinckney had no containment facility: Captain Tubberville had ordered the immediate execution of the infected men and the incineration of their bodies.

Obviously, Petrovsky and Walker hadn’t been the only ones to come up from the Los Angeles. Others, or at least pieces of others, had floated to the surface, contagious flesh mingling with swimming survivors of the Forrest Sherman and the Stratton. Or could it have been something else? Maybe a gas-filled puffball corpse breaking the surface and then opening up to spill spores across the task force?

The cause almost didn’t matter: what mattered was that the task force had become infected. This was going to end in a giant fireball. The only real question was, would anyone get out alive?

“The killer, Orin Nagy, the test missed him,” Margaret said. “I didn’t think false-negatives were possible.”

“They’re not,” Tim said. “He must have found a way to skip his test, or use someone else’s blood.”

Margaret turned to Clarence. “Yasaka has strict procedures in place. How could someone dodge a test?”

“I don’t know the specifics,” he said, “but there’s hundreds of extra men on this ship. It’s very confused up top, no matter how disciplined Yasaka’s crew is. If someone smart tried hard enough, they could probably duck a test. Maybe even two.”

That didn’t make the cellulose test worthless, exactly, but not far from it.

“Maybe more are ducking it,” Margaret said. “There’s got to be another way to look at the task force’s population as a whole, try to get an idea of just how fucked we are.”

Tim raised a gloved hand. “I can get Yasaka to give me access to onboard medical records. I’ll set up a biosurveillance algorithm. Maybe there’s common symptoms reported early, before the infection reaches the stage where it’s detectable and then contagious. If there’s a spike in a certain symptom — say, headaches — we might get an idea of how many people are infected but not yet testable.”

Biosurveillance… she hadn’t thought of that. Maybe Tim’s background in bioinformatics could make a difference.

“Do it,” Margaret said. “But make sure your yeast cultures are the first priority. What’s the status of those?”

“Modified yeast is growing like wildfire,” Tim said. “Population-wise, we’re succeeding, but it remains to be seen if it has any impact.”

Tim didn’t sound jovial anymore. The light had faded from his eyes. He, too, was good at math, and math said he was standing in what would wind up being his tomb.

“We need to split your cultures,” Margaret said. “As soon as we’re finished here, give half to Clarence so he can ship it to Black Manitou.”

Tim didn’t answer right away. Margaret knew he could read between the lines, knew she was confirming his fears that they were all doomed.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess that makes sense.”

Clarence cleared his throat. “I assume sooner is better than later?”

“Yesterday was already a week too late,” Margaret said. “Get ahold of Murray, make it happen. Right now, Tim’s cultures are the most valuable thing on the planet.”

“Will do,” Clarence said. “What about those new crawlers you injected into Edmund? The hydras. Do we need to get those to Black Manitou as well?”

Margaret looked into the containment area again, toward the cell that held Edmund.

“We’ll find out soon,” she said. “I’m going to take samples from him right now, see if the hydras replicated.”

Aside from Tim’s yeast, the hydras were the only other real hope. The yeast would live in the intestine, secreting cellulase into the bloodstream, cellulase that would, hopefully, melt any infection. But Tim’s yeast wouldn’t survive in there indefinitely: normal gut flora would outcompete it, the very nature of the gut itself would kill it, and so on. To maintain effectiveness as an inoculant, people would have to ingest regular doses of the stuff.

Hydras, on the other hand, reproduced on their own. Like the crawlers, they hijacked stem cells, made those stem cells produce more hydras. As far as Margaret could tell, hydras would provide permanent immunity from the infection — no booster doses needed.

But with that possibly permanent immunity came a larger problem: Margaret still had no idea what else the hydras might do. Using them might very well be trading the devil she knew for the one that she didn’t.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get in there.”

She opened the airlock door and stepped into the containment area. Four hospital-gown-clad captives looked at her.

Clark was still sedated and strapped to his bunk. Triangles were beginning to show; pale blue shapes beneath his white skin.

Edmund, of course, wasn’t ever getting up again.

Cantrell stared out, eyes only for her. She’d done nothing to the man, but he couldn’t hide his hate for her. She didn’t know why and didn’t have time to worry about it.

Margaret looked at the three new men.

Men? Of course they were men, although two of them looked like boys. Especially the one who cried silently, tears wetting his young cheeks.

He was in the cell next to Edmund. How old was this boy? Nineteen? Maybe twenty, tops? Had Margaret made different choices in her life, he was young enough to be her son, just like Candice Walker was young enough to have been her daughter.

Margaret closed her eyes briefly, gathered herself. There was no time for those thoughts.

“Clarence, which one was the killer?”

Clarence pointed his gloved hand at a thick-chested man in the second cell in the left row, the one just past the prone Clark.

“Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy,” Clarence said. “Killed two men with a pipe wrench. They were trying to give him the cellulose test.”

Nagy stood ramrod straight, fists at his sides, staring out at Margaret with rage-filled eyes and a smile that promised pain. He had a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. Blood trickled from a purple welt on his forehead. His gown’s short sleeves revealed arms knotted with long muscles, skin dotted with faded tattoos. He looked like a navy man from a ’60s movie.

He didn’t seem to notice the wound on his head. Margaret felt fear just looking at the man, at meeting his dead, psychotic stare.

“We’ll need to put him under and dress his wound,” she said, then gestured to the crying boy. “And him?”

“Conroy Austin,” Clarence said. “The last one is Lionel Chappas. Both of them were found on the same testing sweep that triggered Nagy’s attack.”

She turned to Tim. “Is the outbreak just on the Pinckney and the Brashear? Any infected on the other two ships?”

He shook his head. “The Truxtun and the Coronado haven’t reported any positive results. That’s not surprising for the Coronado, though — the crew and the SEALs onboard haven’t been allowed to interact with anyone at any point. They weren’t even allowed to help rescue people after the battle. The task force has upped the cellulose testing schedule to every two hours. Captain Yasaka reported that there are new deliveries of testing kits being flown here to make sure we don’t run out.”

The Pinckney had 380 crewmembers. That ship alone now required forty-five hundred tests a day. That would wreak havoc on the crew’s sleep, causing people to be tired, irritable… sloppy. But if the increased testing caught any other infected personnel before they became contagious, then maybe there was still a chance.

Maybe, but she doubted it.

“Tim, as soon as you split the culture for Clarence, split it again. Four ways. Keep one as a new starter culture — we’re going to use the other three on the three new men, see what happens.”

She had no idea what effect ingesting the yeast would have on someone who was already infected. There was a possibility it could kill off the infections growing inside of them, though, and that was reason enough to try.

Tim turned to face her. “Three doses for them, or three doses for us? They’re already infected — we don’t even know if the yeast will do that much for them. But we get that yeast in our system, right now, and within a few hours we’ll have enough cellulase in our blood that the infection probably can’t take root. If we do become exposed, the infection is stopped before it even starts. A dose now will last us about a week, I think, but by the end of that week I’ll have cultured far more and we’ll be able to take booster doses. It makes way more sense to take it ourselves, Margo.”

Was he right? Did it make sense to use themselves as guinea pigs? She’d been witness to what the disease did to people: she would kill herself before she let it change her. Tim was offering another alternative. But there wasn’t enough yeast right now to give herself a dose and to know if it might be a cure for those already infected. Every second mattered.

“These men are infected now,” she said. “If there’s a chance the small amount of yeast we have will help them, we need to do it. Besides, that’s data we need to capture and send to Black Manitou before…”

Before it’s too late is what she started to say.

Tim’s eyes narrowed with frustration. “It’s too late for them. We are the ones that can stop this thing, Margaret. We are the ones that need to live, not a bunch of grunts.”

She winced at the use of that word. She’d called Clarence the same thing. Margaret looked at Clarence, saw the sadness in his eyes — but he didn’t object to Tim’s statement. She knew Clarence was doing his own kind of math: the military math of acceptable losses, of choosing the greater good. He didn’t care about himself, she knew, but he obviously wanted her and Tim to be protected, to keep working as long as possible.

Margaret had tuned the crying boy out, but he suddenly grew louder. The suit comms were on a private channel — the young sailor couldn’t hear Tim’s statement of doom, but perhaps he’d read the look on Clarence’s face.

Two options, neither of which promised success: save herself, or try to save these men? She clenched her jaw tight, and made her decision.

“Gas the cells, knock these men out,” she said. “We know the infection has mutated. One or more of these men could have the strain that makes those strange cocoons. We put them under, get samples from all of them before we administer the yeast.”

Tim shook his head. “We need to get the hell off this boat is what we need to do. We’re still clean. Can’t Secret Agent Man call in an evac for us? Let’s get out of here before some psycho kicks in the door and swings a wrench at our heads!”

She took two steps toward him. She meant to stand face-to-face, but forgot about the clear visors, which thwapped together.

“Feely, we need to see exactly what strains these men have. We’ll get tissue samples from each of them, then you divide the yeast, just like I told you to. In a day or two, you’ll have enough yeast for us to take it ourselves. We need to act now, because these men can’t wait.”

“What we need to do next is save our own asses, Margaret.”

“How about we save the world, Feely? Can you stop being a selfish little prick long enough to focus on that?”

He couldn’t hold her stare. He looked off, sniffed, then nodded his head.

“Voice command,” he said. “Feely, Tim. Activate gas in cells three, five and six.”

The men couldn’t hear him, but they knew something was up. Austin and Chappas stood. Chappas pounded on the glass, screaming to be let out. The scream didn’t last long. Colorless, odorless gas filled their tanks. Within seconds, Chappas and Nagy slumped to the floor.

Margaret looked at Austin Conroy. The boy was still crying, his cheeks puffed out, his lips pursed into a tight little pucker. He was holding his breath. Wet, pleading eyes stared at Margaret.

Tim looked away. Margaret did not.

The boy held on for almost thirty seconds, but his crying broke his lips apart and he drew in an unwanted breath. His sobs slowed, then stopped. He fell back onto his bed.

“All right,” Margaret said. “Let’s get to work.”

TIMELINES

That bitch was crazy.

Tim prepared the yeast culture for Clarence. Sure, that had to be done; it only made sense to get it to Black Manitou. Maybe someone could re-create his work from data alone, maybe not — sometimes getting that first engineered organism to produce was more art than science. He’d spent years perfecting his skills and techniques. Douchebag Cheng might fuck it up if he had to re-create from scratch, so sending him an already successful culture, yeah, that was the right thing to do.

But test the yeast that remained on a bunch of poor fuckers who were already infected, instead of just taking it themselves? Crazy. Margaret was willing to sacrifice her own safety for a shot at helping those guys. Maybe Tim had been wrong about her — maybe she and Mr. Flag Waver really did belong together, living happily ever after in the Land of Idealism & Platitudes. He sealed up the fist-sized canister for Clarence. Inside was enough living yeast to start a hundred new colonies.

That left the remainder to be divided four ways: one quarter to continue the base colony, and one quarter each for Nagy, Austin and Chappas.

Tim stopped. Why didn’t Margaret want to use some on Clark, the man who was already showing triangle growth? Clark was a lot farther gone than anyone else. Maybe she was going to drain the hydras from Edmund, put those in Clark.

He eye-tracked through his visor menu, called up the surveillance feed from Clark’s cell. One look showed it wouldn’t be long now. Six bluish triangles with inch-long sides were clearly visible under his skin, a slit near each point running toward the center.

Four days into Clark’s infection. The timeline seemed to vary slightly with every victim — every host’s body responded differently — but if the general track record held true, those triangles would hatch today. Clark’s containment cell would be home to six hatchlings, their inch-high triangular bodies supported by long, black tentacle-legs.

Then what? Someone would have to go in there, put the hatchlings into smaller cages. Those cages would be shipped to Black Manitou. Cheng’s group would study them, look for weaknesses.

And Clark? He’d just be dead.

Tim licked his lips. He had an overpowering urge to get off this ship. But if he did, what then? If the infection somehow reached the mainland, then Tim was fucked anyway. Everyone was fucked.

He looked at his yeast, the result of years of work combined with the dumb luck of Candice Walker’s bizarre immunity. His yeast secreted the killer cellulose that slipped through the gut barrier to enter directly into the bloodstream. Theoretically, anyway — Saccharomyces feely had yet to be tested.

A human trial. That’s what was needed. An uninfected human trial.

He again focused on the video feed of Clark. Tim didn’t want to end up like that, with things growing inside of him, things that would rip out of his body, tear him to pieces.

Tim eye-tracked the menus, zoomed the camera in on the triangle embedded in Clark’s right shoulder. A gnarled, nasty thing. A living, blackish-blue cancer just beneath the skin.

And then, the slits vibrated… they opened.

Three eyes, black as polished coal, seemed to stare right into the camera, seemed to look right at Tim. Alien eyes, demonic eyes, eyes filled with murder.

Tim nodded.

“Yep, that does it,” he said. He reached out, wiped his hand right to left, clearing the video from his view.

“Yes indeedee dodee, that certainly fucking does it right fucking there. Fuck you, Mister Triangle, fuck you right in your fucking face, fuck you very much.”

Tim returned to dividing up the yeast into four cultures of equal size. He knew what he had to do. If Margaret didn’t like it, well, then that was just tough shit.

TWATTER

Twenty-five miles south of the task force, the Mary Ellen Moffett rocked gently from three-foot swells. Compared to most of the trip since leaving Benton Harbor, Steve Stanton considered it damn near a dead flat calm.

He watched his laptops. Bo Pan was lying on the bed. Steve didn’t want to look at him. Maybe the old man had the gun pointed at Steve’s back; maybe it was better not to know for sure. Steve felt sick, twitchy — the stress was grinding him down.

If the Platypus didn’t make it back…

A laptop beeped.

“Contact,” Steve said.

Bo Pan scooted out of his bunk, stood at Steve’s right. Steve leaned a little to the left, an instinctive reaction that he checked before he fell off the edge of the chair.

The old man bent closer. “Did it get the container?”

Steve pointed to the screen.

“It got it,” Steve said. “Holy shit, it got the thing.”

Bo Pan thumped him in the back. “Genius! Steve, you are a genius!”

Steve laughed, the giddy feeling that rolled through him undeniable and unquenchable. For just a moment, he forgot about the old man with the gun, forgot about the danger of an alien disease. Had he really just beaten the entire U.S. Navy? Everything had gone according to plan. The Platypus had the small container holding the alien artifact and had left behind ten pounds of C-4 to blow the submarine’s nose to bits and cover its tracks.

Bo Pan thumped his back again. “This is very good. Are there movies? Can Twatter show us what the Platypus saw?”

For the first time, the old man had used the proper name for Steve’s creation.

“Yes, but we shouldn’t send the movies,” Steve said. “You told me the navy had stepped up activity, remember?”

Bo Pan nodded. He’d made several short, intense cell-phone calls about an angry uncle from Cleveland, which was his handler’s code name for navy ships.

“Then we should wait,” Steve said. “The Platypus will reach our boat in a few hours. The military has to be scanning for any kind of communication. If we broadcast anything before the Platypus gets here, there’s a chance the military will pick off that signal.”

And if they did, what then? Could they triangulate, find the Mary Ellen Moffett? Steve was an American citizen… the thought had never crossed his mind before, but would he be tried for treason?

The moment of elation passed. He’d achieved his objective, but what now? Bo Pan was standing right next to him. Bo Pan, the man with the gun. And as for beating the world’s superpower? Maybe they’d trace this back to him anyway, somehow, no matter how good he’d made his encryption.

Steve wanted to go back to the family restaurant. He wanted to see his mother, listen to his father talk about how hard things had been when he was a kid. Steve wanted to roll forks and knives in napkins, snap the heads off a thousand green beans. He didn’t want to go anywhere near his creation ever again.

“Bo Pan, when you have the container… can I go home?”

The old man laughed. “Soon, my young hero. Go tell the owners of this boat that as soon as the Platypus returns, we are leaving.”

Steve looked up at the smiling old man.

“Leaving? For Benton Harbor?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “No. For Chicago.”

GAMBLING

Clarence stood in the airlock of the control room, fumbling with the biosafety suit’s awkward seals and latches. He just wanted to get the thing off and sit down for a few minutes.

He’d carried the canister of yeast out of the living quarters, gone up the long stairs to the upper deck, all the while wearing the suit. Yasaka had positioned armed guards around him, even established a kill zone — approach Clarence Otto, and you would be shot. He’d carried the yeast to the helipad, handed it directly to a similarly suited man in a waiting Seahawk helicopter. That man had given Clarence something in return: a small, gray, airtight case.

Only when the Seahawk lifted off had Clarence looked around and taken in the dozens of men and women — all exposed to the open air — staring at him like he was a visitor from another world. He was even wearing a space suit, so to speak. They stared because they knew that he was safe, and they were not.

New case in hand, Clarence had headed back down. Decon through the living quarters airlock, keep the suit on while entering the lab area, decon again, climb to the control room airlock, decon a third time, and finally he was free.

He fell more than sat into the console’s comfortable chair. The gray case still had some bleach and disinfectant beaded up on it. Clarence brushed the wetness away, then opened it.

Inside, a bulky cell phone.

“Aw, Murray, you shouldn’t have.”

He’d seen this kind before. The bulkiness came from the encryption hardware loaded inside. The phone bypassed all ship communication, used the normal cell-phone signal available this far from shore. Sometimes spy hardware used secret satellites, gear that cost millions, and sometimes it just used what was available.

He flipped it open. It had one number programmed into it. He dialed.

On the other end, the phone rang and rang. Clarence was patient. He closed his eyes, almost fell asleep — just like that, almost nodded off — then stood up, bounced in place trying to chase the fatigue away.

On the other end, Murray Longworth finally answered.

“Took you long enough,” he said. “Did you stop to jerk off before calling me?”

“Twice,” Clarence said.

“The vaccine on its way to Black Manitou?”

“It’s not a vaccine,” Clarence said. “But yeah, it’s on the way.”

“Good. I’ve seen reports from Yasaka and Tubberville. The task force is compromised. I want to hear it from you, Otto — what are the odds of this thing being fully contained?”

Clarence closed his eyes. He felt for the chair, sat back down. Murray was the hangman, and he was giving Clarence just enough rope to make the noose. Murray did not play games. He wouldn’t hesitate to put the entire task force on the bottom if it meant stopping the infection’s spread. That Murray asked him — not Tubberville, not Yasaka, but him — was a high honor, a mark of ultimate trust; trust that Clarence Otto would tell the truth no matter what the cost.

“The odds are zero,” he said. “Margaret and Doctor Feely both think the genie is out of the bottle and we can’t put it back in. Even if their inoculant works, there’s no way they can make enough in time to stem the tide.”

Clarence didn’t have to see Murray to know the old man’s head dropped, that he probably rubbed at his eyes as he tried to deal with the news.

“Damn,” the director said. “I was truly hoping it wouldn’t come to that.”

That was as close as Murray Longworth would come to an apology. And why should he apologize? He’d made the right call. Command meant that you put people at risk. Sometimes, you sent them out knowing full well they wouldn’t come back.

“Had to be done, sir,” Clarence said. “Yasaka and Tubberville might surprise us, but you need to prepare for the worst.”

“I’ll make arrangements,” Murray said quickly, which meant he’d already mapped out a contingency plan. He’d likely had that plan in place before he’d ever sat in the living room and asked for Margaret’s help.

“Now the hard question,” Murray said. “How about you and Margaret? Are you…”

That was a first: Murray didn’t know what to say. The almost expression of actual sentiment was almost touching.

“Negative so far,” Clarence said. “So’s Feely. If the shit hits the fan, we must get them out of here so they can continue their work.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Murray said sharply, an automatic rebuke. Then, softer: “You know I can’t let anyone who’s been exposed fly back to the mainland.”

“Then keep her at sea,” Clarence said. “Has the Coronado followed orders to steer clear of any other task force ships and personnel?”

Murray fell silent. The lack of response answered Clarence’s question: the Coronado remained an infection-free place to stash Margo and Feely.

Finally, the director spoke. “SEAL Team Two isn’t a taxi service for your wife, Otto. The SEALs are my insurance policy. If the command structure of any ship becomes infected, their mission is kill those people. You think I’m going to take a chance that they could become compromised just to keep Margaret alive?”

Clarence closed his eyes. All this talk of life and death — at least he was no longer in danger of falling asleep.

“Sir, Margaret is too great an asset to waste. She’s working on more than just the inoculant. If you don’t want to lose her, then give me direct contact with the Coronado. If things go bad, I can get her off the Brashear.”

“And what if she’s infected and doesn’t know it? Better yet, what if you’re infected, and you use the Coronado to shit all over the mainland?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to gamble.”

Murray huffed, a sound that turned into a laugh of disgust. “Gamble.” Gamble with a disease that can make us extinct?”

“That’s right,” Clarence said. “You know Margaret is worth the risk.”

He waited through a long pause.

“All right, Otto. I’ll get you in contact with the Coronado. But the ride is for a clean Margaret Montoya. If you find out she’s infected…”

Clarence licked his suddenly dry lips. For better or for worse.

“Director, if it comes to that, I’ll do us both.”

“Good man,” Murray said. “I’ll be in touch.”

A NEW HOPE

Margaret double-checked the time in her visor’s HUD, just to confirm what she already knew; yes, it had been only eight hours since she’d injected two microscopic hydras into the body of Eric Edmund.

They had multiplied.

Samples taken from his spinal column showed a few hydras, as was to be expected. What surprised her was Edmund’s blood: there were already thousands of them in his circulatory system. They thrived in there, reproducing at a rate that defied logic, even strained the limits of her imagination. The hydras reprogrammed stem cells to make more hydras, which then reprogrammed additional stem cells, creating an exponential population increase. If he had thousands inside of eight hours, within twenty-four he would have millions.

Then what? Would they keep reproducing until there were billions? Trillions? Would the hydra population in his body expand until it overwhelmed him, until it started to damage him?

She had no way of knowing, other than to just watch Edmund.

What were the hydras? Were they friend? Foe? Or were they neither, just a parasite that used the human body? And if she dared to hope, what if they weren’t a parasite at all — what if they were symbiotic, something that could live inside the human body without harming it while at the same time protecting against the infection?

The hydras had kept Candice Walker from becoming one of the infected, from becoming converted, but that didn’t mean the new microorganisms were harmless, purely beneficial things. They found their way into the host’s brain — the human brain hadn’t exactly evolved with room for passengers.

Charlie Petrovsky had finally been consumed by the black rot. Other than a pitted skeleton, there was nothing left of him to study. Complete liquefaction just three days after death.

Candice Walker, on the other hand, still showed no sign of the infection’s rapid decomposition.

Margaret eye-tracked through her HUD menus. She directed a microscope to lock onto one of the hydras in Edmund’s blood sample. Its waving tendrils reached out, blindly feeling for something to grab, to pull itself forward.

Walker’s stem cell therapy had introduced something new, something the Orbital hadn’t encountered before. Her infection had modified some of her normal stem cells, which probably produced the crawlers Margaret had seen so many times before. But some of the hacked stem cells must have had that artificial chromosome — was that what produced the hydras? A variant so different that it didn’t recognize the original crawlers as “self”?

The new hydra strain reproduced at a phenomenal rate, but so far didn’t seem to damage the host in any way. Walker had only had the hydras for three or four days, at most — there was no telling what might have happened had they continued to grow inside of her.

So many unknowns, but there was one fact that Margaret couldn’t deny: the hydras secreted a catalyst that killed off earlier strains of the infection — strains that damaged the human host, even killed it.

“You’re protecting your environment,” she said to the microscopic image on the HUD, as if it could hear her, as if it could think about her words. “Walker was your world… when she died, most of your kind died as well. You’re something new. You aren’t a means to the Orbital’s ends at all, are you?”

The hydra didn’t answer. It kept reaching, kept pulling.

Margaret felt her stomach churning. One too many of Tim’s Adderalls? The excitement at discovering a new form of life? Or was it that the hydras’ potential went way beyond Tim’s yeast? Walker’s pustules had contained hydras, hydras that might become an airborne contagion spreading from person to person, all across the globe, promising permanent immunity to the Orbital’s infection.

A different kind of pandemic.

Margaret shook her head. Too risky. Too many unknowns for something that had been created, after all, by the Orbital’s alien technology.

An alert popped up in her HUD: Tim Feely was calling her. She eye-tracked to the icon and connected. His face appeared in a small window in the upper-left corner of her visor.

“Margaret, I’m finished processing the samples taken from the three new victims. Can you join me in the analysis module? I think you better take a look.”

“On my way,” she said.

Tim’s face blinked out.

So little time…

SQUARE-JAWED MAN

Tim knew that if he made it out of this alive, he was changing careers. Janitor, maybe. At a grade school. Mopping floors, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning up puke — he’d be the happiest employee around.

Two doctorates. A lifetime of advanced learning. His work on Black Manitou had been a part of one of the most revolutionary projects in human history, and now here he was neck-deep in another. And where did all that put him? Right in the crosshairs of disaster.

“Tim? Hello?”

His head snapped right, toward Margaret. Clarence was with her; he’d suited up for once, decided to join the party.

Margaret smiled at him. “Tim, you okay?”

He wasn’t. He never would be again.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He wanted to rub the crust from his eyes, but the goddamn suit meant he couldn’t touch them.

“Looks like our three new hosts give us a mixed bag of infections,” he said. “Brain biopsy shows crawler material in Nagy. He’s already converted, obviously. The samples from Chappas show signs of those dandelion seeds you documented in Detroit, so it looks like he’s on his way to becoming a puffball.”

Margaret nodded slowly. “All right. And what about Austin?”

Conroy Austin, the boy who had cried right up until he’d been gassed.

“His body is changing on a scale unlike anything you documented before,” Tim said. “Your earlier research showed the infection seems to concentrate on specific areas of the host’s body, so the altered stem cells are packed in tight. Like a supply chain — the closer the factories are together, the faster and easier it is to combine the parts, right?”

Margaret nodded.

Tim called up an image and shared it with both Margaret’s and Clarence’s headsets.

“The infection is hitting Austin everywhere, and all at once. The poor bastard. It isn’t just rewriting his stem cells… it’s rewriting him.”

“To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the Los Angeles’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”

Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.

“We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”

“Don’t look at the cocoon,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”

Clarence leaned in. “The what?”

“His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But… something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.

Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy shit. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re massive — they look too damn big for his head. And the masseter… it’s at least four times normal size.”

The man’s entire skull looked distorted, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.

Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”

“Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly bigger if he’s not ingesting massive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”

“He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does… he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.

Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was absorbing the other?

“Fuck this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”

Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently, did want to know.

“Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffballs are for mass infection. What role would could this new thing play?”

Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”

Margaret sneered. “Then guess, goddamit. You’re the soldier, remember?”

Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word soldier it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.

Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said you got me there.

“Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the hell out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they can’t build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”

Tim focused on the image of the two left hands. Did one of them look… shriveled?

“So you think whatever is forming under that membrane might act as a new communication device,” he said. “A walking cell-phone tower or something?”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. “Or, possibly, the Orbital thought like a general. The units it had on the battlefield didn’t get the job done, so maybe it wanted something new.”

Margaret closed her eyes, hung her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We have three doses of the yeast, we give one each to Nagy, Austin and Chappas. Then we see what happens.”

It was time to fess up, and Tim knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

“We have two doses,” he said. “Not three.”

Margaret’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then widened in understanding.

“You took a dose?”

Tim shrugged. “If it’s any consolation, it tasted like a baboon’s ass speckled with hot bat guano.”

Clarence’s gloved hands noisily curled into fists. “You disobeyed orders.”

“Oh, whatever,” Tim said. “I’m not military, you goon, and what are you gonna do, cut it out of me? We can’t waste all of it on those guys when we don’t even know if it will help them. We need to know if it works on the uninfected, and that’s me.”

They were angry, sure, but Tim knew he had done the right thing. Not just the right thing, the smart thing. He wasn’t going to take any shit for it. He was ready to stand his ground, argue his case.

What he wasn’t ready for, however, was Margaret’s reaction.

She started to cry softly. Tears glistened on her cheeks — she couldn’t reach inside her helmet to wipe them away, so on her cheeks they stayed.

“Fine,” she said. “Since we don’t have the resources to treat them all, we choose two for the yeast.”

She looked up at Tim, her wet eyes screaming of hopelessness and anguish.

He felt small, insignificant.

“Nagy and Chappas,” she said. “Edmund’s blood is packed with hydras — we’ll try that on Clark since Clark is already so far gone. We’ll apply Edmund’s blood to Clark’s skin. We already know the hydras can replicate if they’re injected directly into the body. This method will let us test if they can also spread by exposure to blood, and, if that works, what impact they have on someone who has triangles.”

She was writing Clark off, and with good reason. His triangles couldn’t be cut out. Tim had taken X-rays, seen the spiked triangle tails wrapped around Clark’s heart, lying against his arteries. Removing the triangles would kill him.

Nagy and Austin, however, were in the early stages of infection. It was worth a shot to see if the yeast could cure them.

Clark, Nagy, Chappas… that left one.

“What about Austin?” Tim said. “The kid who was crying. Are you going to expose him to the hydras?”

Margaret sniffed sharply. Her expression changed — she was done crying.

“We’re not treating him at all,” she said. “We have to know what we’re up against. We have to let Austin’s infection run its course, so we can see what he becomes.”

She turned and walked out of the analysis module. Clarence stared at Tim for a few moments — maybe because of Tim’s selfish choice, or maybe just because Tim had made his wife cry — then followed her out.

HOMECOMING

Cooper stood on the deck of the Mary Ellen Moffett, waiting for the Platypus to close in.

He was experienced and sure-footed, yet the screaming wind and the rough water made him hold the rail to keep from falling overboard. Steve Stanton’s machine had brought with it bad weather, the worst of the trip so far. Stanton and Bo Pan stood close by, watching carefully.

Cooper turned to José. “You ready?”

The Filipino was wearing only swim trunks, flippers, a mask and a snorkel. He gave Cooper a thumbs-up. How in the hell the little man could tolerate frigid temperatures was beyond Cooper’s knowledge.

“You sure you don’t want a wet suit? That water will freeze your balls off.”

José smiled. “I am married with two children. I haven’t seen my balls in years.”

With that, the short man sat on the rail, put his hand tight to his mask and fell backward to splash into Lake Michigan. He surfaced in seconds. He grabbed a buoy that held a cable lead, then turned and swam toward the blinking light of Steve Stanton’s UUV.

The Platypus sat low in the water. The fuzzy, gray, wet material blended in with both the water and the cloudless night, making it look like a sea monster that might suddenly attack José.

José put his hands on the foam surface, pulled it in close. The cable lead had a hook on it, which he threaded through an eyebolt sticking out of the Platypus’s back. José yanked the connection to make sure it was secure, then gave Cooper a thumbs-up.

Cooper looked up to the crane’s tiny pilothouse, where Jeff was waiting. Cooper flashed a thumbs-up of his own. Jeff nodded, then worked the controls.

The winch whined as it reeled in the cable, lifting the UUV high. Water poured down from the machine’s foam covering, first in a triangular downpour, then a thick stream, then drips and drops as the crane pivoted, bringing the UUV over the Mary Ellen’s deck.

Jeff lowered the machine. Seconds after the Platypus touched down, a wave caught the Mary Ellen broadside, tilted the boat severely and splashed a high spray of water across the deck. The Platypus skidded starboard, heading for the edge.

Cooper rushed forward, one hand on the rail to keep his balance. With the other, he grabbed at the wet, gray machine — he couldn’t get a firm grip on the slippery surface. Then Bo Pan was there, throwing himself on top of the Platypus. Steve grabbed the tail; his feet slid out from under him and he fell hard on his ass, but he held on tight.

The two men seemed to have it; Cooper took a quick look to make sure José was safe — he was, already climbing up a rope ladder — then pulled the Platypus toward its storage crate. Jeff came out of the crane cabin and also grabbed hold.

Another wave rocked the Mary Ellen, but four men gripped the UUV and it wasn’t going anywhere. They slid it into the custom-built storage crate, then locked the crate shut. Cooper and Jeff strapped down the lid.

The Platypus was secure.

Cooper smelled something. He looked at his hands, then sniffed them — ugh, like dead fish, or worse. He wiped his hands against his jeans.

Bo Pan had something in his hands: a black tube, about the size of a travel mug. The old man unzipped his jacket and stuffed it inside. He headed for the door that led below, moving as fast as he could in the rough conditions.

Steve followed close behind.

Cooper felt a strong arm slap down hard around his shoulders.

“Hey, Coop!” A smiling Jeff screamed to be heard over the wind. He sniffed his free hand and wrinkled his face in disgust. “Coop, that thing smells like your old girlfriend’s cooch.” Jeff started laughing, as if he’d just made the wittiest statement in all of history.

“Funny,” Cooper said. “Let’s get out of this mess. Time to head for Chicago. And dibs on the shower.”

Just a few hours more, and the Mary Ellen would be free of her strange guests. Cooper and Jeff could head back to Benton Harbor, pay off a shitload of debts, and they’d never have to worry about this whole strange incident ever again.

HATCHING

It wasn’t fair.

No time… no time…

Margaret knew she had the tools to beat the monster, to put a sword deep into its heart, but the monster was already breeding, already spreading.

She stood in the containment area, walking up and down the aisle. Ten clear cells, each with an occupant, all unconscious. Full house. Four more tests had turned up positive on the Carl Brashear. The men had been delivered to the clear holding cells. Another six positives reported from the Pinckney — those sailors were dead, executed on the orders of Captain Tubberville, their remains already incinerated.

Although all the captives were unconscious, their bodies continued to change. Austin’s metamorphosis had kicked into high gear. Even worse, Clark’s triangles were hatching.

Tim had bailed, said he had other things to do. She was done arguing with him. Clarence, however, was there, right by her side.

“Margaret,” he said, “are you sure you have to watch this?”

She nodded. “I do.”

Someone had to be there with Clark, even if he was so doped up he had no idea what was going on. She’d exposed him to Edmund’s hydra-filled blood, naively hoping for a miracle. The hydras had begun to reproduce almost immediately. She didn’t know what, if anything, would happen next.

“Clarence, if you don’t want to watch, I understand.”

He shook his head. “If you’re going to endure it, then I’ll endure it with you.”

A noble gesture coming from a man who had left her. That was his nature, though — he’d have done the same for anyone he was assigned to.

Her heart raced. Maybe that was from the Adderall, not the situation, but the situation was enough to give anyone a coronary.

Austin lay on the floor of his cell. Brown fibers were sprouting from all over his young body, slowly crawling across his skin, sticking to both the metal grate deck and the clear glass walls. If she stood still and watched carefully, she could see those fibers moving, see new fibers pushing out of his body. It was like looking at time-lapse footage of a growing plant. At this rate, he’d be covered in a matter of hours. She was uploading a live feed of that to Black Manitou, making sure the information would survive even if things got really bad.

She was also sending live video of Clark. His triangles had started moving a few minutes ago. Blinking, twitching and jiggling as the tentacle-legs hidden inside him started to flex, to push, trying to drive the creatures out of the man’s body.

Margaret had seen a hatching once before, when three of the monsters had torn out of a woman named Bernadette Smith. Clark’s hatching seemed different… like something was wrong. The black eyes that had stared out with visible hate, visible intelligence, now widened, shut tight, widened again.

Almost as if the creatures were in pain.

The triangles started to lurch, to push against Clark’s pale skin. Out and back, out and back, a little farther each time, stretching his skin so taut it reflected the lights from above.

He lay there, unconscious thanks to the anesthesia — a mercy for his final moments.

Clarence shook his head. “This is awful.” His voice cracked with the strain. The horror show had gotten even to him. She reached her left hand out to the side, slowly, until it brushed against his. Without hesitation, he held her hand tight, their gloved fingers linking together.

The triangles jumped harder, so hard the man’s prone body shook, made his straps snap, made the solid metal table rattle like a snare drum.

This was the reason Perry Dawsey had cut into himself, over and over. He’d sensed this was coming and done what no man could do, what Clark hadn’t had the chance to do.

One of the triangles stopped jumping. It was on Clark’s left abdomen. The man’s skin sagged like a sock with a tennis ball inside. The hatchling wasn’t moving. Its eyes looked… lifeless.

The one on his shoulder started to vibrate.

Her fingers clamped down tighter on Clarence’s.

The shoulder triangle’s eyes widened, bulged… then one eye popped in a tiny splash of black and green. The triangle kept twitching but no longer pulled against the stretched and torn skin. It spasmed like a moth caught in a spider’s web.

She looked at a third, this one on his muscular thigh… it was swelling.

“It works,” she said, barely able to believe the words herself. “It’s the hydras, has to be… they’re killing the hatchlings.”

The sound of fists pounding against glass startled her, made her jump away. Clarence didn’t let go of her hand.

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy, the man who’d killed two people with a pipe-wrench, stared out. Madness wrinkled his face into a twisted mask. He’d been gassed and should have been under for at least another two hours — how the hell had he woken up?

He pointed at her.

“Your little trick won’t work on me, bitch! I know you put something in my belly, but you know what? I’m fucking fine, thanks for asking!”

Had his crawlers overcome the anesthesia? Counteracted it, somehow?

A slight pull on her hand — Clarence, pointing into Clark’s cell. The hatchling on Clark’s thigh had swollen to water-balloon proportions, triangular sides bowed outward against taut skin.

Skin and triangle alike ruptured, spurting purple and black and red a foot into the air before it splashed down on top of his thigh, sticking like thick mucus.

Then another pop, and another.

Then, nothing. No motion at all, not from Clark, not from his triangles… just the slow, oozing drip of blood and viscous fluids pattering down to the floor of his cage.

“Jesus,” Clarence said. “What do we do now?”

She had failed to save Clark, but his death wasn’t in vain — now she had a weapon, even if she did not yet understand how to use it. His death had served a greater purpose.

Margaret turned, met the crazed stare of Nagy. His death would also serve a purpose. And in truth, the man he’d once been had died days before.

“I’ll tell you what we do now,” she said. “We find something that will put Nagy under, and we dissect his brain so we can see if Tim’s yeast did anything to him.”

She smiled. Only a little, but she couldn’t help it. She hoped the infected still had some degree of communication, at least a shred of their inexplicable telepathy. She wanted them to know she was about to kill Nagy… first him, then all of them.

SELF-MEDICATION

Tim knew what was going on in the cells. That didn’t mean he had to watch. If his yeast inoculant didn’t work, that could very well be him in one of those cells, with some jackass doctor or scientist calmly watching monsters tear out of his body. Maybe they would take notes. Maybe they would frown sadly at his imminent demise.

For the moment, his talents were best used elsewhere. He sat alone in the analysis module, taking advantage of the opportunity to examine his biosurveillance results. He’d set up two algorithms: the first to scan the medical records of the seventeen confirmed positives, look for any commonalities or recent trips to the ship doctor; the second to analyze prescriptions and over-the-counter sales of medicine taskforce-wide.

Six of the seventeen infection victims had visited ship doctors. There could have been more than that — all medical staffers were impossibly overworked taking care of the wounded, and there was no way of knowing if they’d properly tracked visits.

Of those six, though, there was an instant commonality: they had reported to the infirmary with complaints of headaches, body pain, sinus drip, and sore throats. Minor things, especially at a time like this. The docs had prescribed ibuprofen and cough suppressants. Basic treatments for common ailments. So common, in fact, that most people with aches and a sore throat wouldn’t talk to a doctor at all — they’d just tough it out.

Tough it out, or, self-medicate.

He called up his second algorithm, the one that data-mined records of all medical supplies across the entire task force.

When the results came up, he felt a cold ball of fear swell up in his stomach, felt a panicked tingling in his balls.

He had to tell Margaret.

CONSUMER HABITS

Margaret and Clarence sat in the theater/briefing room, waiting for Tim to come in and deliver his urgent news.

She had just watched a man die, yet she felt… excited. Walker’s hydras were a weapon, a contagious weapon. They spread via contact with blood. If pustules formed on Edmund, she would test those as well but she already knew that would also result in contagion.

The hydras killed the infection, but what else did they do? Hopefully she would have enough time to study that, find out what the side effects might be.

So far, Tim’s yeast had produced no noticeable effect on Chappas. It was several hours into the test, yet they had no way of knowing what the catalyst’s effects might be, if there were any at all. Maybe they’d get lucky with Chappas; maybe the yeast would cure him.

She’d dissected Nagy’s brain herself, found it thickly webbed with the crawler-built mesh. Tim’s hypothesis seemed correct: once the crawlers reached the brain, it was too late.

But that didn’t change the possibility that the yeast could inoculate the uninfected. Sooner or later they would have to test that theory. Since Tim had selfishly helped himself to part of the first precious batch, Margaret wondered if he might volunteer. Somehow, she didn’t see that happening. Tim was an excellent scientist, but he was also a coward. He didn’t have an ounce of Clarence’s self-sacrificing nature.

Speak of the blond-haired devil: Tim rushed into the room, more wide-eyed than ever. He smelled of sweat. He carried a laptop, information already displayed on the screen.

Margaret stood. Her legs ached. Her whole body ached. “So what’s this critical information, Tim?”

He handed her the open laptop.

“I found a significant indicator for infection,” he said. “We can probably detect outbreaks across larger populations, and do it even before victims would test positive for cellulose.”

Margaret looked at the screen: a chart showing purchases of cold medication? Clarence came up to stand by her side, read as well.

At first, she didn’t understand the significance, but then it clicked and clicked hard.

Clarence shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “People buying cough drops and ibuprofen shows that they’re infected?”

“Not on an individual basis,” Tim said. “But in the bigger picture, yes. It’s how the CDC can spot a flu outbreak, based on an abnormal spike in sales of medicine that treats flu symptoms. Seventeen people on this flotilla have tested positive so far — shortly after the battle, six of them reported coldlike symptoms of headaches and body pain.”

Margaret read through Tim’s numbers; they painted a frightening picture.

“Ibuprofen could be meaningless,” she said. “People are working hard, they’re beat-up, stressed, but look at this — the Pinckney’s ship store is out of Chloraseptic, Robitussin and Sucrets. Almost out of Motrin and Tylenol.”

“Inventory for those items was at eighty-five percent the day before the Los Angeles attacked,” Tim said. “Two days after the attack, inventory on pain meds and cold meds dropped to fifty-five percent. Three days after the attack, those supplies were at about thirty percent. Today — four days after the attack — the supplies are gone. Those supplies should have lasted six months or more.”

He sniffed, whipped the back of his hand across his nose. His bloodshot eyes stared out. Tim was in bad shape.

“The Brashear isn’t as bad,” he said. “But consumption is clearly up. If I’m right, the Pinckney is badly infected and the Brashear is close behind.”

Margaret noticed that Clarence was staring at Tim. Not in disbelief, or in surprise or admiration, but in suspicion.

“Tim,” he said, “you have a runny nose?”

Margaret felt the room grow cold. Clarence’s hand had drifted near the pistol strapped to his left side.

Tim, however, didn’t seem to notice. “A little,” he said. “I’m kinda wired and worn out, you know? Fuck-all long days it’s been.”

Then he, too, saw Clarence’s stare, and understood. Tim leaned back, held up his hands.

“Don’t get crazy, big fella. I just tested negative like ten minutes ago. Besides, the yeast probably made me immune.”

“Probably,” Clarence said. “But if you were already infected for more than a day or two, the yeast doesn’t do anything, right? You were here during the attack, treating dozens of sailors. You could have been exposed.”

Margaret reached out, put a hand on Clarence’s arm.

“Just test him again,” she said. “Remember, he’ll test positive well before he’s contagious to us, so calm down. I doubt he’s infected.”

Clarence raised his eyebrows: how do we know that?

“I’ve got the sniffles, too,” she said. “And my body hurts all over.”

Clarence took a step back, giving himself enough space to watch both her and Tim.

Margaret sighed in exasperation. “Clarence, for fuck’s sake. Tim and I are working around the clock here — at some point, the body breaks down. You get the sniffles, you get headaches. So how about we all test now, together, just to be sure? We can test again every time we step out of the suits.”

Clarence relaxed slightly, almost imperceptibly, but he wasn’t convinced.

“Okay,” he said. “But unless you’re in your suits, I need you two to stay away from each other. And both of you keep your distance from me, got it?”

She let out a sarcastic huff. “Good to see you’re consistent.”

Now he looked only at her. There was hurt in his eyes. She wanted to take those words back, but she couldn’t.

Clarence put both hands on his face, pressed hard, rubbed. He lifted his head, blinking rapidly, sniffing in a big breath.

“If Tim’s theory is right, we have to assume well over half of the Pinckney is infected, about to convert and become violent. I need you both to suit up and finish whatever you’re doing in the lab. Get samples of your work packed up and ready to travel on a moment’s notice.”

Margaret had been thinking only of numbers, but Clarence’s urgency drove home a harsh reality: the Pinckney was a heavily armed warship, one that might soon be overwhelmed with the Converted.

THE SEAL

Paulius Klimas had never seen a cell phone quite like the one that had been handed to him by the captain of the Coronado. It was a bit smaller than the satellite phones he’d carried into at least a dozen missions, and ridiculously heavy for its size.

The captain had asked Paulius to his stateroom, provided the phone, then left, giving Paulius privacy. That alone indicated some important shit was about to go down. The first call to the new phone had come from none other than Admiral Porter himself. That call had lasted all of three minutes, long enough for Porter to stress that the safety and future of the United States was on the line, and that Paulius was to facilitate in any way possible the next person who would call.

Maybe that finally meant some action.

When the battle had occurred four days earlier, he and his men had been ordered to do nothing. The Coronado hadn’t launched boats to rescue the drowning, hadn’t welcomed the wounded aboard. Zero contact.

As other ships sank, as flaming oil spread across the water, Paulius had watched sailors fighting for life and he had done nothing to help them. He and his men from SEAL Team Two could have put their three Zodiacs into the lake, could have grabbed dozens of sailors from the water, could have saved many lives — he had never felt so ashamed of following an order.

But he had obeyed. He had made sure his men obeyed.

Paulius understood the order, even if he didn’t agree with it; so far, no one on the Coronado — SEAL Team Two included — had tested positive for the infection. He and his men were a contingency plan, to be used in a worst-case scenario.

And now, it seemed, that scenario had arrived.

The Pinckney, the Brashear and now even the damaged Truxtun had reported positive tests, incidents of violence and murder, even the execution of military personnel. Porter’s call meant it was almost time to act.

The phone buzzed. Paulius answered.

“This is Commander Klimas.”

“Hello, Commander,” said a baritone voice on the other end. “This is Agent Clarence Otto.”

Paulius nodded. Yes, finally, there would be a role to play.

“Agent Otto, I have been instructed to follow your orders.”

“Good,” Otto said. “What have you been told so far?”

“That you control the package, and that the package is our highest priority.”

The package, in this case, was a person — one Dr. Margaret Montoya, and whatever she might be carrying. Tim Feely and Agent Otto were to be rescued as well, if possible, but Dr. Montoya had become the focus of Klimas and his team.

“Excellent,” Otto said. “I need you to prep for an extraction.”

“Understood. When?”

“Soon. We’re hopefully finishing up some research here, but we may have to bug out at any moment.”

Three people from a ship that was already known to be compromised. When Paulius went after them, he’d probably take all twenty SEALs under his command, bring the package back to an isolated ship with a crew of fifty. Just one infected person could mean the death or conversion of everyone onboard.

“May I ask as to the state of health for you three? I’ll come get you if you’re halfway down a crack leading straight to hell, but I’d like to give my people the best possible chance of making it out of this alive.”

“Are you asking if you should be wearing CBRN gear?”

The acronym stood for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear, and applied to the bulky biohazard suits military forces wore when any of those four threats were present.

“They do get in the way a bit,” Paulius said. “If possible, we’d rather go with our usual attire.”

Paulius heard the man breathe in deep through his nose, let it out slow. A thinking man, perhaps. If so, that was a good sign.

“All three of us are negative at the moment,” Otto said. “But be ready to adapt. Listen, Commander, I want something to sink in. If I call you, the people you’re bringing out and the material they are carrying could save the world. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s literal.”

“Admiral Porter told me we were saving the USA. Now it’s the world. Go figure. If we fail to extract the package, what’s the worst-case scenario?”

“Extinction,” Otto said. “The entire human race, gone. If any of your men signed up to be heroes, Klimas, this is their chance.”

Agent Otto sounded like an okay guy. Maybe he had a service background. He didn’t sound like a bullshitter, but he was still a suit — bullshitting and suits went hand in hand. His words, however, stirred Klimas’s soul; no one joined the SEALs to push pencils.

Saving the world? This was as big as it got.

HEADING FOR PORT

Cooper sat in the bridge of the Mary Ellen Moffett, guiding the ship toward Chicago at eight knots. The wind had picked up to forty miles an hour. Waves hammered the boat. It was two in the morning, the storm blocked out all stars, and snow swirled madly — his visibility was damn near zero.

At a time like this, Lake Michigan was the wrong place to be.

The weather forecast said the storm would die down in a few hours. Once it did, he could make better time, probably hit Chicago sometime that afternoon.

Everyone else was asleep. As well they should be — the job was almost over, and the weather had made everything about as difficult as it could be.

Cooper yawned. He drank a little coffee; it was already cold, but he didn’t care. He just needed to stay alert for three more hours, then Jeff would take over and Cooper could get some sleep. If all went well, he’d wake up just in time to help dock the Mary Ellen. Then he and his best friend would be rid of Steve Stanton and Bo Pan. They wanted off in Chicago? Well, that was just fine.

After that sweet good-bye, Cooper and Jeff could hit the town. A couple of days in the Windy City would be just the thing. José could come, too, if he opted to go out for once instead of rushing back to his family, as usual.

Look out, Chicago… the boys are about to be back in town.

BATTLE STATIONS

“Hey, Margo,” Perry said. He smiled, that smile that would have made it rain endorsement-deal millions had he fulfilled his destiny in the NFL.

“Hey,” Margaret said.

“I got Chelsea.” Perry’s smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but… I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.

“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”

I’m so sorry I failed you, Perry… I tried so hard…

“You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”

The same dream, the same lines, and now, the same sound — the whistle of a bomb rushing downward to kill him.

A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.

Perry stared at her. Then, he looked to the sky. “That doesn’t sound right, does it?”

The whistle; it had always been a consistent sound, growing steadily as the bomb fell, but this time it sounded intermittent… on, then off, on, then off.

Perry leaned in close. “General quarters, Margo — all hands man your battle stations.”

Margaret jerked awake. She was trapped, held down, something wrapped all over.

Cocooned.

Margaret blinked, reeled from the stab of terror that flooded her chest. No, she wasn’t in one of the fleshy brown cocoons… she was in her biohazard suit.

She was in the lab.

The sound of an alarm filled the air, audible even through her thick suit, a high-pitched whooop… whooop… whooop that told her things had gone bad.

She was sitting at a workstation next to the butchered body of Candice Walker. Margaret had fallen asleep, right on the keyboard. On the screen, an endless line of BBBBBBBBBBBBBB stretched from the top to the bottom.

She heard Tim’s voice in her helmet speakers.

“Margaret! Get up! We’re under attack!”

Under attack? That didn’t make any sense. Who would attack them on Lake Michigan?

A hand grabbed her arm, gripping hard against the blue synthetic material, jerked her around. Tim Feely, eyes wide and nostrils flaring behind his clear visor. He held a metal canister in each of his gloved hands.

“That’s the combat alarm,” he said. “What do we do?”

A voice bellowed over the speaker system, making them both jump.

“General quarters, all hands man your battle stations.”

The blaring alarm returned at full volume.

The floor suddenly bucked up beneath them, tossing them into the air. Margaret landed on Candice’s body — both she and the corpse fell to the floor. Monitors, tools and equipment rattled down all around them. Margaret found herself staring into Candice Walker’s empty skull, the concave impressions of where her brain had once been reflecting the lights from above.

Candice… the hydras had made her immune…

The hydras. Margaret had to save the hydras.

She jumped to her feet, as did Tim. A canister had fallen to the debris-cluttered floor. He picked it up and clutched it to his chest.

Margaret pointed at the canister. “That the yeast or the hydras?”

Tim flashed a glance at it. “It’s the yeast.” He looked down, around, a move made awkward by the bulky helmet. “The other one has the hydras… where is it?”

A cold vibration in her chest; if they lost that canister, she’d have to go back into the holding cells — in the midst of all this insanity — and draw blood from Edmund. She turned, looking for the canister amid the fallen equipment and scattered supplies. The morgue module looked like an earthquake had thrown it to and fro. Candice’s body lay on the floor, half on and half off an overturned autopsy table.

An excited voice blared from the ship’s speaker system.

“All hands to battle stations, we’re under fire from the Pinckney. Repeat, under fire from the Pinckney. All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

The ship lurched again, hurling her across the module. She slammed into a wall, felt her head bounce off the inside of her helmet. Lying on the floor… left shoulder stinging… someone yelling… she smelled smoke.

How could she smell smoke? She was in the suit…

The stinging in her shoulder. She looked, saw a piece of torn metal jutting out, blood trickling down the blue synthetic fiber of her suit. A hole… six inches long, ragged…

She was exposed.

Hands pulled her up, hands far stronger than Tim Feely’s. Margaret found herself staring at Clarence. He, too, was wearing a suit, but there wasn’t a mark on it. He had his pistol holster strapped to his right leg.

“Margo! You okay?”

She glanced at her shoulder. No, she wasn’t okay.

Clarence pulled her close, looked at the shard of metal. “It’s not deep. Hold on.” He reached up, grabbed it, gave it a light tug — the sting intensified for a second, then eased off.

He put his left arm around her, placing that hand on her wound and squeezing, applying direct pressure even as he urged her toward the door.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re moving. We’ve got to reach the side airlock.”

Margaret planted her feet.

“The hydras,” she said. “There’s a canister of them around here — we have to find it!”

The floor lurched beneath her again, a concussion wave slapping like the hand of a giant. Stunned, she started to fall back, but Clarence held her up.

“No time,” he shouted. “Move! Feely! Get your ass up and follow me!”

Margaret didn’t have a chance to see if Tim was okay, because Clarence all but dragged her to the ruined door. The door and walls alike were bent and shredded, white surfaces streaked with sooty black. Small fires flickered wherever they could find purchase.

Clarence raised his foot and lashed out, kicking the door open. He led her from the morgue into the analysis module, which was in better shape, straight through it to the miscellaneous lab and finally out of the trailers altogether.

He turned right, pulling Margaret along, headed for the airlock that led into the receiving and containment area.

Then Tim was next to her, the yeast container still pressed to his chest. Something had split his helmet visor. Blood poured from his forehead down the left side of his face, making his left eye blink spasmodically.

The airlock looked intact.

She planted her feet. “No! What if the explosions broke the containment cells? Those men could be out! My suit… I could be exposed.”

Clarence pulled his pistol from its holster, pointed it at the ground.

“Tim, get that door open,” he said. Tim ran to it.

Clarence pulled Margaret forward. “Margo, we don’t have a choice. We either get into the water so the SEALs can rescue us, or we go down with the ship. We don’t have long before strike fighters blow everything to hell.”

Fighters. Murray had pulled the plug. He was going to fire-bomb the Brashear, the Pinckney, the Truxtun, send all of it — metal and man alike — straight to the bottom.

Tim opened the door and they all moved inside. He sealed it up, started the pressurization cycle. As air hissed in, he looked at her arm.

“Shit,” he said. “There’s sticky tape in the processing area inside the big side airlock. We can seal this up.”

The airlock finished cycling. Clarence opened the door to reveal a smoke-filled mess. Sodium hypochlorite sprayed down from the ceiling; she smelled it instantly, filtering through the tear in her suit. The automatic decon procedures had kicked in, and she instantly saw why — the containment room had taken a direct hit.

Something had blown a hole in the white wall and slammed into the clear cages, ripping apart the middle cells. Bodies and parts of bodies — some red and raw, others blackened and smoldering — lay scattered among foot-thick, spider-webbed shards of glass.

She saw Conroy Austin’s severed head, a sleepy look on his young face. Something had torn it from his shoulders. It had come to rest on the bloody, ragged neck, temple pressed against a broken chunk of cell. A rain of bleach wet his hair to his scalp. Bits of brown material clung to his cheeks.

The two cells closest to her had avoided the worst of the damage, but thick cracks lined their walls. The cell on the left held Clark’s hatchling-ridden corpse, still strapped to the metal bed. But the cell on the right, Cantrell’s cell… it was empty. The cracked door hung open, its flat-panel monitor black and still.

Where was he? He’d tested negative all the way through. Could he come with them?

Clarence released her shoulder. He stepped out of the airlock door, pistol in both hands, barrel in front of him. He moved to his right along the bulkhead wall that separated the containment room from the lab area, keeping the metal to his back. Bleach rain drizzled on his suit, ran down it in rivulets.

He looked back at her, reached out his left hand and curled his fingers inward: follow me.

Tim gently pushed Margaret’s back, urging her forward. She stepped out and followed Clarence. Bleach beaded up on her visor. She quickly reached her right hand up and held her left shoulder, covering the hole in her suit as best she could.

Clarence kept moving to his right, eyes on the shattered cells in front of him. He reached the empty prep area just inside the wide exterior airlock. The endless rain splattered off the stainless steel equipment. He looked back at her, urgently waved her forward.

She stumbled toward the garage-door-sized airlock. Tim ran past her, head still tilted down as much as he could manage, his blue suit wet and gleaming.

The bleach smell grew stronger — some of it had leaked into her suit. It wouldn’t be long until the fumes made her lungs burn. Clarence had to get them out fast or she’d be as good as dead.

Tim reached a keypad to the right of the airlock. He punched in a code. The heavy door let out a hiss of compressed air, then slid open.

Margaret stared out into a nighttime blizzard. Through the whipping snow she saw shimmering lights — the Pinckney looked like a mystical fortress rising from the depths. Snaps of orange and yellow dotted the sky, muzzle flashes lighting up like the sparkle of cameras in a dark arena.

Fresh air blew in hard, making the bleach spray in any direction but down.

“Oh shit,” Clarence said. He grabbed her, held her tight. “Tim, hold on!”

From the rear of the shimmering, gray leviathan that was the Pinckney, Margaret saw a billowing cone of fire and heard a simultaneous blast that hammered her ears. The deck bounced beneath her. She fell, landing on top of Clarence’s thick chest.

A roar overhead; Margaret looked out and up, saw a bulky helicopter moving through the whipping snow, away from the Brashear and toward the Pinckney. Something flashed from under the helicopter’s stubby wing. A missile shot forward trailing a rope of glowing smoke. The missile closed the distance in two seconds: a fireball erupted from where the Pinckney had just fired.

“Margaret, hold still.”

Clarence, shouting to be heard over the alarm and the explosions. She turned to see something moving toward her face. She closed her eyes, trusted him, felt that something tug down around her neck and shoulders, pushing her suit against her skin.

A life jacket.

“Look at me,” Clarence said.

She opened her eyes. Bits of snow and ice clung to her visor, sliding down the glass along with the spraying bleach. Through it, and through his visor as well, she locked onto his intense eyes, his commanding eyes.

He shouted. She listened.

“The jacket will keep you afloat,” he said. “We have to jump. You’ll hit and go under, but you’ll pop right up.”

She heard a ripping sound, looked to the source — Tim Feely, wrapping sticky tape around his back and belly, over and over again, fastening the yeast container to his stomach.

Clarence ran to the wall and grabbed another life jacket. He pulled it around Tim’s head even as the smaller man kept taping. Clarence fastened the life jacket as Tim cut the tape and tossed the roll away.

Through the wind and the spray and the sound of gunfire, Margaret heard something to her right — the labored breathing of a man in pain.

She turned and saw Cantrell coming for her, not even ten feet away, black skin wet from the bleach rain, his squinting eyes red and swollen.

In his hands, a fire axe.

She took a step backward, away from the man. “Clarence!”

He was there, instantly, stepping between her and Cantrell, pistol raised and firing.

Margaret kept backing up as the first round made Cantrell twitch to the right. The second bullet blew out the side of his head. He fell like he had no bones at all, face slapping on the metal deck.

She took one more step back to stop her momentum, but the foot hit empty air.

The fall lasted forever and less than a second, a moment of nothingness before she slammed into the water.

All noise ceased instantly; someone had turned off the volume. In front of her, blackness.

Cold hit her hard and from all sides. Her body went rigid. Her breath locked in her chest. Then, sudden heat across her skin as her suit automatically tried to compensate for the drop in temperature; she felt it everywhere but her shoulder — there, a creeping, icy death as water poured in.

She had a sensation of rushing upward, saw tiny, wavering lights, then her helmet-covered head popped back into the noise of war. Gunfire and screaming, the roar of flames, the concussive pulse of explosions so powerful that air slapped against the water. The surface reflected the firework flashes from above.

In front and behind, towering ship hulls rose up like smooth, impenetrable castle walls. Swells lifted her and dropped her.

She felt that numbing cold, that clutching snake wrapping around her feet — water pouring in through the tear in her suit, filling up her boots.

Margaret turned sharply, trying to lift her left shoulder out of the water. She dipped into a deep trough. From her right came a new roar as a black monster tore free from the top of the wave, kicking out a spray of water that sparkled orange from the reflected fire above. The black shape crested, almost flew, then came down hard in another splash of molten orange.

Not a monster: a black boat, a raft, packed with men who looked like robots, dark bulky shapes and smooth helmets and huge guns mounted to the raft itself.

A line of splashes burst up in front of her face. Bullets, someone shooting at her from up on the Brashear or the Pinckney. As one, the boat’s gunners aimed up: the black monster breathed fire.

The boat rapidly slowed to a stop near her, its bow wave pushing her back. A black man — no, a man wearing blackface — pointed a black rifle at her, screaming to be heard over the gunfire. “Identify yourself!”

“Muh… muh…” Her jaw chattered so hard it hurt her teeth.

“Identify yourself!”

“Muh… Margaret… Montoya!”

The point of the rifle lifted. The man leaned forward and reached, grabbed her life jacket and pulled her toward the boat.

“I’m Commander Klimas,” he said as he yanked her up. “Stay down and don’t move.”

She felt a strong hand push her, not to harm her but rather to hold her still. Margaret found herself in the bottom of the raft, lying against a soaked and shivering Tim Feely. Most of his suit had been cut away. A black blanket covered his shoulders. His bloody scrubs clung to his body. He clutched the container of yeast tight to his chest.

The deafening guns continued to roar, to spit tongues of flame up at the sky. Shell casings rained down, bouncing off her visor, landing in the boat or hitting the surrounding water where they vanished with an audible tsst.

She saw a knife move near her face, then a rapid tugging on her suit as someone cut it away in long shreds. A long, heavy blanket was thrown on top of her, tucked around her shoulders.

The boat shot forward, smashing against the tall waves, rolling her against black-booted feet. She sat up, knees to her chest, pulling the blanket close to try to fight off the cold that rattled her body.

“Where is Clarence?” She screamed to no one, to everyone. One of these men had to know. “Agent Otto, where is he?”

The unmistakable plunk-plunk-plunk of bullets smacking into the boat.

Something hammered into her right thigh, made the muscles numb — she was trying to get her bearings when the numbness quickly faded, replaced by a branding-iron pain that seemed to singe her femur.

Wincing, fearing the worst, she opened the blanket to look at her leg. Blood poured from the wound, hot against her ice-cold skin, matting her scrubs to her thigh. She grabbed the thin fabric of her pants and ripped — a long gash ran from a few inches below her hip down to midthigh. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, only grazed her.

A man landed hard in front of her, black face tight in a grimace of agony, left arm across his chest, left hand clutching at the back of his neck. Blood poured out from between his fingers, looking just as black as everything else.

She forgot about her leg, lurched forward to help the soldier.

“Tim! Come here!”

Tim stuffed the yeast canister into his scrub top, then leaned over the wounded man, trying to keep his balance as the boat rose up and smashed down again and again and again. Tim’s hands probed the back of the man’s neck.

Margaret wiped her cold, bloody fingers against her soaked scrub top, then slid them along the man’s throat, looking for additional wounds.

“Clear and breathing,” she said. “How bad is the wound?”

“The bullet took out most of the posterior musculature on the right,” Tim said. “The jugular and carotid were spared, but he has significant hemorrhaging from the wound. I think the brachial nerve plexus is gone.” Tim sounded calm, of all things. Margaret briefly wondered why he’d gone into research — the man had been born for this.

Gunfire roared around her. She sat up higher, hands searching the man’s combat webbing for something that felt like a flashlight.

Again a hand came down from above, grabbed the back of her neck, tried to force her flat. Her palms pressed against the bottom of the boat.

“Stay down!”

The boat hit hard against a wave: it felt like driving a car into a wall. The hand came off her for a second. She pushed up and swung her right elbow back as hard as she could, felt it clonk into something both hard and soft.

“I’m a doctor, goddamit, let me work! And give me a fucking light!”

Plunk-plunk-plunk, another string of bullets stitched across the small boat.

She felt the hand reach down again, but this time it pressed something against her chest: a small flashlight. Margaret flicked it on and scanned the man’s body; he might have other wounds that were even worse.

The boat hammered across the waves, repeatedly rising up hard then dropping to smash against the concrete surface.

She found nothing.

“No additional wounds,” she said, then handed the light to Tim.

That strong hand on her yet again, on her shoulder this time. Klimas, the SEAL who had pulled her in, knelt next to her.

“Agent Otto is in the other zodiac,” he said. “He’s okay.”

She felt a burst of relief, albeit a brief one — she had her hands full trying to save a life.

Tim adjusted his grip on the wounded soldier. “He’s still breathing, he’s moving his legs, and I think the major vessels are intact. He can survive this if we can control the bleeding.”

“Cease fire,” another voice called out. “Cease fire!”

The gunfire stopped, leaving only the driving snow and the howling of the wind.

Klimas stood. “Recovery complete,” he said. “We’re clear.”

From high above, she heard the loudest sound yet. She looked up in time to see a flicker of flame heading behind them, toward the Pinckney and the Brashear.

A missile.

She looked away just before it hit and became a deafening, temporary sun that lit up the surface of Lake Michigan.

The task force was done for. Captain Yasaka, Cantrell, Austin, Chappas, Edmund, all the crew from both ships and the Truxtun as well — all gone.

So, too, were the last of the hydras.

A black-gloved hand dropped a black canvas pouch in front of her. It was about twice the size of a paperback. She looked up, saw the black-faced Klimas looking down.

“Trauma kit,” he said. “Save him.”

She nodded.

Thoughts of Clarence, the battle, the dead, the hydras, even the awareness of her shivering body and her own wound faded away as she and Tim Feely went to work.

THE SELECTION PROCESS

In the deepest points of Lake Michigan, the water temperature remains steady at just a few degrees above the freezing point.

The intense cold hadn’t stopped the apoptosis chain reaction from affecting the Los Angeles’s dead crew, but it had slowed the process enough so that plenty of rotting meat remained on their bones. Meat, for example, that was on the severed leg of one Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

When the Platypus ground its way past that leg, slimy flesh sloughed off onto the machine’s acoustic foam covering. This coating of partially rotted tissue contained thousands of cyst-encased neutrophils.

As the Platypus returned from its mission, the regular, mechanical vibrations of its fins and inner workings caused the neutrophils to come out of hibernation. The microscopic organisms shed their cyst coats and prepared for the touch that might give them a host. When Cooper Mitchell, Jeff Brockman, José Lucero, Steve Stanton and Bo Pan worked to secure the Platypus to the deck, Charlie-slime smeared onto exposed skin — the neutrophils found their new homes.

The five men had no idea what had happened. They had no idea what was coming next.

The neutrophils secreted chemicals to make microscopic fissures in the hosts’ skin, then slid through those fissures, penetrating deep inside. The little bits of crawling infection sought out stem cells, tore them open and read the DNA within.

It was there, at that initial point of analysis, that the neutrophils chose the role of each host.

One host had a genetic disposition for increased size — significant height, heavy bone density, above-normal muscle mass — so the crawlers in that host programmed stem cells for one of the two new designs.

Another host’s genes showed significant indicators for high intelligence. Extremely high intelligence. For this host, the neutrophils chose the other new design, a design that would be the true masterpiece of the long-lost Orbital’s bioengineering efforts. The neutrophils rapidly changed their form, shedding cellulose to become a microorganism made from normal human proteins. Then, they converted stem cells to produce millions of copies of themselves. From there, all would head straight for the host’s brain.

The genetic makeups of the final three men were unremarkable. They were normal. For those three, the crawlers chose between three random options — these men would become a kissyface, turn into a hatchling factory or swell up with gas, soon to pop and spread the infection wherever their spores would reach.

In twenty-four hours, one of the hosts would become contagious. In forty-eight hours or so, all of the hosts’ brains would start to change. Sometime past seventy-two hours of incubation, they would start to recognize each other, realize that they were all members of a new species, a species above and beyond humanity.

Roughly ninety-six hours after infection — in just four days — they would not only recognize each other, they would start to work together.

Work together… to spread.

Margaret slowly awoke. Darkness, save for the lights of medical equipment. She lay on her back, blankets pulled up to her chest. She started to rise, but a bodywide ache froze her in place.

“Oh, man,” she said.

The last time she’d felt like this was the day after her first Boxercise class — everything hurt. This was what she got for years of sitting on her ass. But at least her muscles had served her well enough to get out; she was alive, which was more than could be said for most of the poor souls on that task force fleet.

She was in what looked like yet another trailer. A kind of trailer, anyway — this one was small, barely big enough for two field hospital beds, cardiorespiratory monitors, ventilators, a rack of IV pumps, a spotlight, and compact cabinets packed with supplies. An IV line ran into her arm.

A man lay in the other bed. She didn’t recognize him. Margaret did, however, recognize the wound area — this was the SEAL she and Tim had worked on. They had saved this man’s life. That felt good. It seemed ridiculous to feel that way, considering the hundreds of bodies now at the bottom of Lake Michigan, and yet, it mattered.

She slid her hospital gown down over her shoulder. As she’d suspected, not that bad of a wound at all. Eight stitches. Could have been so much worse.

Could have been and probably was: she’d been exposed. She might test positive in a day or two, possibly even less considering she didn’t know how long she’d been asleep.

Margaret flipped the blanket from her leg, looked at her thigh. It had been neatly dressed. Black ink on the white bandage… was that writing? She slowly lifted her leg for a closer look.

For a good time, call Tim.

Margaret laughed, and even that hurt.

The trailer door opened. A man stepped in. He wore fatigues printed with a pixilated digital pattern of gray, black and blue. Nice-looking man: pale, pink skin, a heavy jaw and a chin that would have got him work in Hollywood were it not for his beady eyes, which seemed to be just a bit too close together. His right eye had a bruise under it.

The man shut the door. He took off his camo hat and held it behind himself with both hands. He stood between the beds, mostly because there wasn’t enough space to really stand anywhere else. He stared at her, as if he expected her to know who he was.

“Hello,” Margaret said. “Is there something I can do for you?”

He smiled. “Don’t recognize me without my makeup?”

The voice brought it home — it was the SEAL who had yanked her out of the water, covered her body with his own as bullets rained down around them.

“Klimas, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Commander Paulius Klimas. How are you feeling?”

“Sore.”

He nodded. “I can imagine. You went through quite an ordeal. I have a message for you from Director Longworth. He sends his best and said that Doctor Cheng is making excellent progress cultivating the yeast. He also said you’re to rest, and that he’ll video conference with you tomorrow. Which you can do right from the Coronado, by the way.”

Ah, that’s where she was.

“I don’t remember coming aboard.”

“You passed out,” he said. “Right after you and Doctor Feely” — Klimas nodded to the unconscious man in the hospital bed — “stabilized Levinson here.”

Passed out? Blood loss, fatigue, concussive damage, shock, stress… probably a combination of all of it.

“How is Doctor Feely?”

“Fine,” Klimas said. “He treated your leg. He was rather insistent about it, actually. He’s been sleeping ever since. Agent Otto is awake though, and he asked about you. Would you like me to bring him in?”

Why, so he can whisper more lies about how he loves me?

“Tell him I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t want to see him. How long have I been out?”

“About sixteen hours, ma’am.”

That word, ma’am: it made her instantly feel old.

“Call me Margaret, please. Do I look like a ma’am to you?”

He shrugged. “Except for the people under my command, every woman is a ma’am and every man is a sir. It’s not my fault I was raised right. And please, call me Paulius.”

She nodded once. “Very well. Paulius, I want to thank you and your men for rescuing us. It might not mean much, but I owe you. If I can repay your bravery, I will.”

He laughed lightly.

“That’s odd,” he said. “I was just about to say the same thing to you.” He nodded toward the unconscious Levinson. “He’d be dead if it wasn’t for the bravery of you and Doctor Feely.”

Margaret felt suddenly uncomfortable, embarrassed. “Our bravery? You came in like something out of a movie. I’d have drowned without you. Or been shot. Or blown up. Or burned. Take your pick.”

Klimas shook his head. “When the bullets fly, most people hide behind us. Trust me, I’ve done this before. Margaret, you took a bullet, then — under enemy fire — you and Doctor Feely saved my man’s life. That’s behavior I would have expected from a trained SEAL, not a civilian.”

She knew a man like Klimas wouldn’t make light of comparing someone to a SEAL. His words seemed to make her more aware of the ache in her thigh.

“I didn’t get shot,” she said. “Well, I did, but… are you a Monty Python fan?”

Klimas smiled. “ ’Tis just a flesh wound?”

She nodded.

“You got shot,” he said. “End of story.”

He grew serious, leaned forward just a bit. His eyes carried a certain coldness. Commander Paulius Klimas was polite, sure, but he was still trained to take life whenever ordered.

“You saved one of ours,” he said. “If you need us, we’ll be there.”

His intensity frightened her. These weren’t just words — she knew that if she was in trouble, this man would kill for her.

Klimas stood straight, smiled. The moment of gravitas was over.

“Besides,” he said, “I know you’re a fighter.” He pointed to the bruise under his right eye.

She remembered lashing out, her elbow hitting something. Her face flushed red. “I did that?”

“First shiner I’ve had in years.”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”

He laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you need?”

She was hungry. “A sandwich would be good.”

“I’ll get food in here for you right away. Anything else?”

Margaret gestured to the small trailer around them. “What is this room?”

“It’s called a mission module,” Klimas said. “Instead of building everything in as a permanent part of the ship, the Coronado has space for modules that serve different purposes. This one, obviously, is a medical module. My unit has several — bunk modules, weapons maintenance, mission prep, that kind of thing. We’ve cleared out a bunk module for you, so you’ll have private quarters.”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not, I can’t put your men out.”

He held up a hand to stop her. “Normally, you’d get a stateroom, but we’re restricted to the hold in hopes of providing some separation between us and the crew.”

“You mean between the crew and anyone who had contact with me, Clarence and Doctor Feely.”

Klimas shrugged. “Tomato, tomahto. We’re in this together now. At any rate, the decision has been made — if you don’t sleep in the bunk room, it will sit empty.”

“Thank you, Commander. At least I know chivalry isn’t dead.”

His expression changed. For the first time, he looked uncomfortable.

“There’s one more thing,” he said.

Her eyes shot to his hip, to the holster there and the pistol in it. She hadn’t given it a second thought… until now.

“You have to test me, right?”

Klimas reached into a pocket of his fatigues and pulled out three white boxes. The number surprised her.

“Three?”

He nodded. “One for you, one for Levinson and one for me. All my men are testing every three hours. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go first.”

He offered her one of the white boxes. She stared at it. There was only one door into the mission module; by standing between the beds, Klimas had blocked the only way out. If she tested positive, he would kill her.

But if she did see that red light, did she really want to live?

She reached out and took the box.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Seconds later, she stared at the blinking yellow light. Slowing, slowing…

Green.

Klimas smiled. “Only twenty-three more or so to go, right?”

She ran through the math in her head. “Yeah, three days ought to do it. We’ll know by then.”

Margaret sagged back into the bed. She still felt exhausted — the unexpected moment of intense fight-or-flight response hadn’t helped.

Klimas opened another box, cleaned Levinson’s finger, then pressed the tester against it. Yellow, yellow, yellow…

Green.

“Two down,” he said. “My turn.”

“Maybe you should give me the gun.”

He opened his testing unit. “Don’t worry about that. If we see red, I step out that door and everything will be taken care of.”

Yellow… yellow… yellow…

Green.

He gathered the boxes and testing units like nothing unusual had just happened, like he was cleaning up after a late lunch.

“Margaret, you still look pretty beat. If you’d like to move to your bunk module, you could get more sleep.”

He held up another white box: this one full of small, circular Band-Aids.

She nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to get out of here.” She removed the IV, wiped up the drop of blood and applied one of the bandages.

“Lead the way, Paulius.”

He opened the door for her. She stepped out onto the deck. She was in some kind of a cargo hold, much smaller than what she’d seen on the Brashear. Other mission modules were lined up end to end along the hold wall.

Margaret noticed a SEAL standing about fifteen feet from the door she’d just walked out of. A young man, black. The name on his left breast read BOSH. He had a gun strapped to his chest, barrel angling down. She’d seen that weapon before, recognized it: an MP5.

He had both hands on the weapon. Bosh must have been the one who would have taken care of everything if Klimas had tested positive.

“Margaret?” Klimas said. “This way, please.”

She followed him toward a module. From the outside, they all looked the same. She cast a glance over her shoulder; Bosh was following, hands still on his weapon.

Margaret suddenly hoped the testing units were as accurate as Tim claimed — if her next test mistakenly returned a false-positive, she might not have time to ask for a second chance.

Klimas held a door open for her. As Margaret stepped in, she saw Bosh take up position outside the module. Inside were two sets of stacked bunks, gray blankets wrapped so tightly around the mattresses you could bounce a quarter off them.

“Take your pick,” Klimas said. “I’ll have that sandwich brought right out. Someone will check on you for your next test. Until then, I’ll ask that you stay in here.”

She nodded. He left, closed the door behind him.

Margaret sat on the first bunk. It seemed to pull her in, drag her down. With a U.S. Navy SEAL ready to execute her standing right outside, she fell asleep almost instantly.

PAY THE MAN

“It is necessary,” Bo Pan said. “We’ll take them one at a time.”

Steve Stanton could barely breathe. His head throbbed. He was already responsible for killing one man, at least — and now Bo Pan wanted to murder three more?

“No,” Steve said. “I won’t be a part of this.”

Bo Pan’s eyes narrowed. As always, the two of them were alone in the tiny stateroom. Bo Pan stood in front of the closed door. If Steve tried to force his way past, would he make it? Would the old man shoot him down?

“Steve, you have done your nation a great service, but our work is not over yet.”

Steve tried to speak with volume, with intensity, but his throat hurt, felt painfully scratchy — all that came out of his mouth was a cracking whisper, the voice of a boy rather than that of a man.

“We don’t have to kill them. They have no idea what’s going on. Just give them their money and they’ll leave.”

Bo Pan’s nostrils flared. He drew a breath, ready to give a lecture.

Steve spoke first. “If you kill them, I’ll tell.”

The words sounded petulant, childish, but it was all he could think to say.

Bo Pan’s head tilted forward until he stared out from under his bushy eyebrows.

The footage from the Platypus replayed over and over again in Steve’s thoughts. Not the low-res pictures taken every twenty seconds, but the full-speed, high-def footage stored on the machine’s internal drives. The dark footage of the man entering the Los Angeles’s nose cone, light beaming from a bulky suit that looked like it belonged to like a fat astronaut… the look of surprise on the diver’s face as the Platypus shot in, cut the umbilical cord and then snatched the small, black container… a brief instant of that expression shifting to horror as the snake curled around his bulbous helmet.

Steve hadn’t seen anything else, because the Platypus was already slithering quietly through the wreck, leaving the diver behind to die in an explosion of C-4 that likely blew the sub’s nose cone wide open.

That diver’s blood was on Steve’s hands.

He’d thought only of himself. He’d programmed what Bo Pan told him to program, because he’d just wanted to go home.

Bo Pan wanted more death: Steve would not allow that to happen, even if saying no meant dying himself.

Steve sat very still, wondering if he’d die right in this very room, among empty cans of Coke and crinkly bags of Doritos.

And then, Bo Pan’s face softened. The old man relaxed. He let out a sigh.

“As you wish,” he said. “We would not have achieved this without you, Steve. We will pay them, then we go on our way.”

Steve blinked. “You mean it?”

Again, the words of a child. He was in the middle of an international incident, had just defeated the U.S. Navy, was trying to stop the murder of three innocent men, and he sounded like a boy whose mother had just promised him a new toy.

Bo Pan nodded. “Yes. You are right. It would just cause too many problems. They don’t know what is going on, so it is not worth the risk. We will dock and I will leave.”

Which brought up another problem — Steve wanted to be as far away from Bo Pan as possible.

“Am I supposed to go with you?”

“No. You will return to your parents.”

Steve was going home. In a day, maybe a little more, he’d be sitting at the restaurant, eating his father’s cooking. Could it be true?

Bo Pan smiled a grandfather’s smile. “I am sorry you can’t come with me right now. Soon enough, however, you will be welcomed in China as a hero.”

The old man thought Steve still wanted glory, when all Steve wanted to do was hide and forget this had ever happened.

“Okay,” Steve said. “I understand.”

Bo Pan took out his cell phone. He awkwardly typed in a message, one slow thumb at a time. He sent the message, yawned, then put the phone away.

“I have arranged transportation,” he said. “Four men will be waiting for us when we arrive at the dock to help us with the Platypus. A truck will take you and your machine back to Benton Harbor.”

Four men? The Platypus wasn’t that heavy. Steve and Bo Pan could move it on their own — crate and all — and had done so many times.

Bo Pan rubbed his face. He sat on his bunk, laid his head on the pillow.

“I am going to sleep,” he said. “Don’t make noise.”

The old man started snoring almost immediately.

Steve tried to stay calm. He felt a fever coming on, but he didn’t have time to get sick. He was probably safe. Probably. Bo Pan still needed him; just because they’d found one alien artifact didn’t mean there weren’t more on the bottom of Lake Michigan, and only Steve and his Platypus could recover those artifacts if they were discovered.

But Bo Pan didn’t need Cooper, Jeff or José.

Steve stared at Bo Pan for a few minutes, made sure the man was actually asleep. Then, he sat down at his little table. His fingers started working the laptop’s keys: quietly, so quietly.

The storm outside was finally dying down. They would be in Chicago in a few hours.

He had to act fast.

KNOCKIN’ AT THE DOOR

Heat.

She felt it through her biosafety suit. Angry wind scattered loose papers across the crumbling asphalt and the cracked bricks that made up the road’s surface. At the end of the street, she could see the wide Detroit River — steam rose up from it, heavy steam, because the water was boiling. Abandoned buildings on either side of the street seemed to sag slightly, like they were exhausted, like the heat had taken the masonry and paint to just a few degrees below the melting point.

This wasn’t right. Why was it so hot? The bomb hadn’t hit yet.

She started to sweat suddenly, not in droplets but in buckets that poured off her, dripped down to fill the boots of her sealed suit.

Sweat pooled around her ankles… her shins… her knees.

Her hands shot to the back of her neck, clawing at the helmet’s release clasps. Sweat pooled to her thighs.

If she drowned in her dream, would she ever wake up again?

Gloved fingers searched for the clasps, darted back and forth, hunting desperately… but there were no clasps.

Sweat rose past her belly button.

“Hey, Margo.”

She stopped moving, looked out the curved visor to the huge man who had suddenly appeared before her. Dirty-blond hair hung in front of his electric-blue eyes, even down past that winning smile.

“Hey,” she said.

The sweat tickled the base of her throat.

“I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but… I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

She started to tell him that she didn’t care, that she really didn’t give a fuck about his goddamn problems, but when she opened her mouth to speak, it filled with the hot, salty taste of her own sweat.

The level rose to her nose.

Perry reached out a hand. A triangle point pushed the skin of his palm into a pyramid shape, its blue color dulled by his nearly translucent flesh.

The sweat rose above her eyes, stung them, turned Perry into a shimmering vision.

Margaret heard a squelching sound, felt something hit her visor. She couldn’t see Perry — all she saw was a wiggling, bluish-black creature: an inch-high pyramid with tentacle-legs twice as long as the body, plastered to her visor like a still-twitching bug splattered on a windshield.

The legs squirmed, spreading Perry’s blood across the clear surface.

Margaret’s lungs screamed at her: breathe, you have to breathe!

The hatchling’s tentacles wrapped around the back of her helmet. The triangular bottom of the pyramid body had little teeth that sank into the visor’s plastic, bit and pulled and ripped.

It tore open a hole. The sweat started to lower. She felt it drop to her forehead, then her eyes. She blinked away the sting, holding on desperately, waiting for it to drop below her nose.

When it did, Margaret drew in a gasping breath.

The hatchling scurried down her suit. It hit the ground and ran for the sagging buildings.

Perry’s smile returned.

“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to the brain. Margaret, I don’t want you to lose control.”

“You won’t,” she said, the words familiar and automatic even though so much of the dream had changed. “They won’t have time.”

Perry’s smile widened. “I didn’t say my brain.” He put his hands on her shoulders, gave them a brotherly squeeze. “I said yours.”

She heard a banging. Not the whistle of a bomb, not this time, but rather a banging as if someone had a gong and was hammering the whole city at once, bang-bang-bang.

“Somebody knockin’ at the door,” Perry said. “Do me a favor, open the door, and let ’em in.”

Bang-bang-bang!

Margaret sat up, aching muscles voicing their complaint before they started shivering, shaking so bad that her back hurt and her teeth clacked. Her head throbbed. She needed water. Her throat felt so dry, so sore.

Her dream was always the same — why had it changed?

The sweat filling her suit… just like the icy lake water had done when she fell out of the Brashear. Her brain had brought the real-life trauma into the dream. And what Perry had said, that was just a reflection of her own fear of infection.

That was why.

That had to be why.

Her dream suddenly came to life again as the same bang-bang-bang sound made her jump.

No, not bang-bang-bang… a knock-knock-knock.

“Doctor Montoya?”

Klimas, calling through the door.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Come in.”

The door opened. He leaned in, beady eyes staring, smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Ah, you’re dressed,” he said. “That saves some awkwardness. It’s time for your third test.”

She realized there was a plastic-wrapped sandwich on a plate, sitting on a small table that folded down from the wall. She didn’t remember anyone bringing it in.

“My… third?” The words cut at her dry throat. “I didn’t take a second.”

Klimas nodded. “Yes, you did. Passed with flying colors. You don’t remember?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well, you were pretty groggy,” Klimas said. He offered her the all-too-familiar white box. “Please put this to good use, then Doctor Feely said you need to see something.”

A white box. A foil envelope inside. Inside of that, Tim Feely’s little prick.

I didn’t say my brain… I said yours.

The dream, so different. She shook her head, chasing away the thought so she could focus on the present.

“How long was I out this time?”

“Six hours or so,” Klimas said. “Feely said you could skip a test. Not like you’re going anywhere, right?”

Six hours… she’d slept for sixteen before… that made twenty-four hours or so since the battle on the Brashear…

Could infection symptoms start in twenty-four hours?

Margaret blinked. She was being ridiculous. The battle, the abuse to her body, a dip in the icy waters of Lake Michigan, her wounds — she was just rundown, out of shape. Maybe she’d caught a basic, run-of-the-mill common cold.

There was one way to find out.

She reached out and took the box. With practiced motions, she swabbed the base of her thumb and poked herself with the tester before she had time to think about what she was doing.

Then, she stared at the flashing yellow light. Flashing slower… slower… slower…

Green.

She sagged sideways onto the bunk.

Klimas stepped forward, caught her. “Margaret, you okay?”

She nodded, weakly. He helped her sit up straight. “I’m fine. Couldn’t be better.”

He patted her shoulder. “That’s a good soldier. So come on, get up. Doc Feely said you’ve rested enough.”

He stepped back to the door and held it open for her. She stood, let the blanket slide away. She wore fatigues. When had she put those on?

That’s a good soldier. She was dressed like one. In the past few days, she had sure as hell acted like one.

Fuck you, Clarence. I’m better off without you.

Margaret walked out of the mission module and onto the cargo bay’s gray metal deck. Loud male voices filled the area. A row of closed mission modules lined the far side. In front of her, she saw three neatly stowed black boats, the same ones the SEALs had used to rescue her. In front of the boats, two Humvees on metal pallets that were chained to the deck.

Behind the boats lay an open area filled with around twenty armed men wearing camouflage uniforms. In the middle of them, wearing fatigues that were too big for him, stood Tim Feely. He’d set up a makeshift lab of some kind. Metal table, and a big metal pot that hung from an improvised tripod made of plastic poles and duct tape. Beneath that pot, three Bunsen burners cast up small, blue flames. A tube ran from each burner to a blue tank strapped into a dolly.

Clarence stood at the far edge of the circle. He was staring at her. He wore a gray T-shirt, fatigue pants and black combat boots. She wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking how he’d fucked up, how he was now alone. Maybe he thought she’d want to take him back.

Some of the soldiers sat on crates or chairs, others leaned against cargo and bulkheads, still others just stood there. They were talking and laughing. She saw an open crate, boxes of infection testing kits inside. Used testing units littered the area; what lights she could see glowed green. The men were checking themselves. She knew exactly what would happen if one of those units glowed red.

Three of the men raised cups to their mouths and drank. Their faces scrunched up in disgust. One of the men — Bosh, who had been prepared to shoot her — bent over at the waist, as if he was about to vomit. As men do, the others all hooted and hollered, playfully mocking him for being weak.

A short man with the worst excuse for a mustache she’d ever seen leaned in, shouted at Bosh.

“Oh come on, D-Day,” the man said. His name patch read RAMIEREZ. He was shorter than everyone present except for Tim.

“Admit it,” Ramierez said. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had some random, hot goo in your mouth.”

“Only his mom’s,” said another man, this one big enough to make Clarence look small, almost as big as Perry Dawsey had been. His name patch read ROTH. “Especially when she had the clap!”

The other men laughed loudly, relishing Bosh’s discomfort. He gagged again and almost lost it, which made them shout at him even more.

Bosh stood, his big eyes watering. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’d rather lick the pus from an infected camel taint than taste that again.”

Klimas cleared his throat loudly. The men all reacted immediately, their eyes snapping first to him, then to Margaret.

“Gentleman,” he said, “we have company.”

The men immediately straightened, quieted down. They all grinned at her, beaming with admiration — all except Bosh, who looked quite embarrassed.

Tim gave a dramatic bow. “M’lady, welcome back.” He stood straight. “Good to see you tested negative.”

She nodded. If she hadn’t, she would have died in her bed, and everyone knew it.

Bosh took a half step forward. “Ma’am, I’m sorry if that comment was offensive.”

He looked mortified. Somewhere, out there, was a mother who had taught this young man to always be a gentleman, probably backed that up with several swats to a younger Bosh’s behind.

Margaret couldn’t let him suffer. “It’s okay. I actually like camel-taint pus in my martinis, but it’s an acquired taste.”

The soldiers laughed, and the tension evaporated.

Clarence didn’t smile. He just stood there, staring.

The stink of Tim’s kettle drew her attention. She walked up to it. It steamed a little. Inside, she saw a thick, light brown broth. It wasn’t boiling, but whitish bubbles clung to its surface.

She looked up. “Good thing you brought that yeast with you, I see.”

“Lucky me,” he said. “Who’d have thunk it?” He looked like the cat that ate the canary. He’d risked his life to bring the yeast with him. She’d thought he’d wanted to save it for research purposes, to make sure a second colony existed outside of Black Manitou, but this made more sense and meshed with his selfish personality — if he was going to be immune on a ship full of heavily armed soldiers, he wanted to make sure they were just as immune as he was.

“You brewed up quite a batch,” she said. “And I see you have no compunction about giving these men something that’s completely untested?”

Tim shook his head, a gesture that said, Don’t even try to judge me, sister.

“Their choice,” he said. “Come on, Margo, the worst that can happen is they get a wee bit gassy.”

He had a point. Tim had ingested the concoction over twenty-four hours earlier, and he seemed fine. Worst-case scenario, really, was that it might make people a little sick. Best-case scenario: immunity from the horrific infection.

Klimas stepped closer. “As I said earlier, Margaret, my men and I came into direct contact with you, Tim and Agent Otto. If any microorganisms survived the bleach spray, then we were also exposed. Considering we just had to shoot at our own countrymen, we chose to take our chances with Doctor Feelygood’s camel-taint pus.”

Margaret’s eyebrows raised. “Doctor Feelygood?”

Tim nodded, a huge grin on his face, the grin of a nerd who knew he’d been taken in and genuinely accepted by the coolest kids in school. “That’s right,” he said. “Seems Commander Klimas is a fan of Mötley Crüe.”

Tim dipped the ladle into the smelly broth. He poured the contents into a cup and offered the cup to her.

“All my genetic tinkering has given this vintage quite the lovely bouquet,” he said. “Hints of chocolate and elderberry, I think.”

The soldiers watched, waited for her reaction. All of a sudden she found herself in a bizarre variation of a fraternity hazing ritual — drink if you want to be one of us.

Margaret took the cup, felt the broth’s warmth through the plastic. Inside, thick bubbles floated on the milky yellow surface. It smelled like wet gym shoes stuffed with wilted cabbage.

She looked around the room. “To the SEALs,” she said, and brought the cup to her lips.

They shouted in encouragement as she tipped her head back, letting the whole cup’s contents slide into her mouth. She sensed the warmth a moment before she experienced the taste. Her stomach heaved and she gagged, but the men were watching her — if they could do it, so could she.

Margaret pinched her nose shut, braced herself, and started swallowing. It took three gulps to get it all down.

She gagged again, but nothing came up. She lifted the cup high, laughing at how close she’d come to vomiting.

Klimas was the first to smile wide and pat her on the back. He wasn’t the last. Everyone did.

Everyone except Clarence. He just lowered his head, turned and walked deeper into the cargo hold.

NEUTROPHILS

Bo Pan slept. His body did not.

Thousands of crawlers worked their way up his nervous system, following the electrochemical signals along the pathways, heading ever closer to the source of those signals: the brain.

But the crawlers weren’t the only microorganisms moving through his body.

Hundreds of thousands of neutrophils navigated in a different direction, moving down his arms, searching for his hands. In particular, for his fingertips.

There they would stay until Bo Pan touched something: a tabletop, perhaps, or a door handle, maybe a mug or a glass. The neutrophils could survive on that surface for a day or two, three at the most. If fortune smiled upon them, someone else would touch that same surface long before their time expired.

And when that happened, the neutrophil would stick, it would burrow, and it would go to work on its new host.

THE EVER-PLEASANT DR. CHENG

One of the Coronado’s mission modules was a small teleconference center. Paulius referred to it as the “SPA,” an acronym for “SEAL Planning Area.”

Margaret sat at the room’s conference table, Tim to her right, Clarence across from her. A flat-panel monitor hung on one end of the module, the image split down the middle: on the left, Murray Longworth in Washington; on the right, Dr. Frank Cheng in the research lab on Black Manitou Island.

Murray looked like he hadn’t slept in days. But then again, he always looked that way. His tailored suit hung looser than she remembered it, as if he’d lost even more weight in the three days since Margaret had last seen him.

Three days? Had all this happened in just three days?

Murray’s body looked like it might fail him at any moment, but his eyes burned with undiminished intensity. He was close to winning, and he knew it.

As for Cheng’s fat face, Margaret could barely stand to look at it. While she had hidden away in her home, Cheng had been climbing the ladders of both the CDC and the Department of Special Threats. In the CDC, he was the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. That made him the top dog there for dealing with the alien infection. If Tim’s yeast worked, if it provided immunity, Cheng would be a shoo-in to become the CDC’s next overall director.

As for the Department of Special Threats, the organizational chart wasn’t as neatly defined. Murray put people into roles as needed. There was no doubt, however, that Cheng was the DST’s number one scientist. Frank Cheng answered to Murray Longworth, to the president of the United States, and to no one else.

All Cheng’s power and status could have been hers. All she’d had to do was take it, but she’d chosen the coward’s way out.

Or maybe… maybe Cheng had tricked her somehow. Had he? And had someone helped him?

Margaret looked across the table, at Clarence. Clarence, who had allowed her to stay home all that time. Had he worked with Cheng to keep her out of the picture?

She chased away that random, illogical thought, wrote it off to exhaustion. She rubbed her eyes as she listened to Cheng speak.

“We are making progress,” he said, his fat face split by an arrogant smile of self-satisfaction. “I’ve perfected the genome of the YBR yeast strain.”

Tim held up a finger. “Excuse me? The what strain?”

Cheng’s smile faded. “The YBR2874W strain, Doctor Feely. Properly named — Y for yeast, B for chromosome two, R for right arm, 2874 for strain number and W for coding strand.”

Tim slapped his hands on the table in an exaggerated bit of outrage. “Oh no you don’t, Chubby. Naming goes to the discoverer or creator, and I be both. We already have a proper name, you blowhard, and that proper name is Saccharomyces feely. But you can call it the Feely Strain, if you like. Note the repeated emphasis on the word Feely, as in, you feel what I’m cookin’?”

The teleconference screens let people in different parts of the world make actual eye contact, let Cheng look Feely right in the eyes.

“Naming nomenclature is an established practice, Doctor Feely,” Cheng said. “Many researchers are involved in this project. We wouldn’t want to disassociate them from any credit by putting only your name on it.”

And with that, it was instantly clear that Cheng’s decision was about disassociating someone. He intended to take the credit for Tim’s brilliance, for Margaret’s discovery of the new cellulase, for everything, even though he’d been safe on Black Manitou Island while Margaret and Tim had been shot at, nearly blown up and almost drowned. Cheng couldn’t grab all the glory if the strain was named after Tim.

Tim leaned back in his chair. He smiled, laced his fingers behind his head, and looked at Murray’s monitor.

“Director Longworth, perhaps you should arbitrate this disagreement,” he said. “As our impartial third-party observer, who is right? Cheng… or me.”

Murray stiffened. Tim seemed so confident, almost as if he had something on Murray, or as if the two had worked out a backroom deal.

The director waved a hand in annoyance. “Fine. Cheng, you wouldn’t have had anything to work on in the first place if it weren’t for Feely’s work. The yeast already has a name, so use it and let’s move on.”

Tim rocked slowly in his chair, smiling wide at Cheng.

Cheng’s fat cheeks quivered with anger. “Very well. We’ve initiated an intensive incubation program to increase the yeast cultures that were delivered yesterday. We’ve also, as I mentioned earlier, altered the genome to create additional strains — some of which, I might add, show far more potential to be our magic bullet.”

Margaret wasn’t surprised. Cheng was a climber and a glory grabber, no doubt, but he was no fool and he had a small army of scientists at his disposal. Creating multiple strains was the logical approach. The more weapons they developed, the better chance of having one or two that would devastate the enemy.

“Developing variant strains is mandatory, Doctor Cheng,” Margaret said. “But that doesn’t address mass production. How are we going to make enough of this stuff to dose over seven billion people?”

Cheng’s easy, arrogant smile returned. Margaret knew he’d come up with an original idea, one he’d be entitled to claim as his own.

“Breweries,” he said.

Margaret’s eyebrows raised… not just an original idea, a brilliant original idea.

Clarence looked from Cheng to Murray to Margaret — he didn’t understand what Cheng was talking about.

Tim leaned back in his chair, surprised. He looked almost disappointed that Cheng had thought of it and not him.

“That’s great,” he said. “How many breweries are involved?”

Now it was Murray’s turn to smile. “Most of the breweries in America, Canada and Mexico are onboard. President Blackmon’s been on the phone nonstop with beverage company executives. Believe me, she’s quite convincing.”

Tim shook his head slowly. “Well, spank my ass and call me Sally,” he said. “Cheng, I always thought you were a smelly, stupid douchebag with the integrity of a five-dollar whore, but you know what? You’re not stupid at all.”

Cheng started to give a nod of thanks, then stopped, unsure if he’d just been insulted.

Clarence looked at Tim, then to the screen, then at Margaret again, anywhere for an answer. “Sorry, can someone tell me what’s happening? Breweries?”

Tim slapped the table again. “Beer, man. People have been using yeast to make beer for, shit, well since before we started recording history. We don’t need to build production facilities for” — he turned to look at Cheng — “for Saccharomyces feely” — Tim turned back to Clarence — “because all over the world there are places already equipped to brew yeast cultures around the clock. Those places are called breweries.”

Cheng’s face was reddening. Tim had refused to let the man have his moment of triumph; Cheng couldn’t help but chime in.

“And the distribution infrastructure is already in place as well,” he said. “Most of the breweries have either their own bottling facilities or direct contracts with them, fleets of trucks, dedicated distribution centers — they can brew it, bottle it, and ship it.”

No wonder Murray thought he was going to win.

“Sounds good in theory,” Margaret said. “But will it work for the entire planet?”

Murray waved a hand in annoyance. “Do you mind if we focus on the USA first, Margaret? This is a massive effort, yes — one of the biggest projects in our nation’s history. Fifty of the largest breweries already have starter cultures. Each of those fifty is delivering subcultures to at least ten more. In two days, we’ll have fifteen hundred American breweries producing inoculant. We can make everyone who drinks it immune.”

“Temporarily immune,” Margaret said. All eyes turned to her.

“Let’s not forget that one dose doesn’t last forever. Tim’s inoculant is good for…” She turned to Tim. “For how long?”

His eyes glanced upward in thought. He pursed his lips, tilted his head left, then right.

“Oh, about a week,” he said. “Then it’s going to fully process through the body.”

Margaret nodded. “A week. So you’re not just talking three hundred and twenty million batches for the good ol’ USA, Murray, it’s three hundred and twenty million batches a week. If the disease gets to the mainland, the inoculant can slow the disease’s spread — but it can’t stop it altogether.”

Cheng huffed. “Unless the disease breaks out in the next three weeks, we’ll have enough repeat doses for everyone in North America.”

Margaret shook her head in amazement; Cheng was really starting to piss her off.

“This disease could give a fuck about borders,” she said. “If you don’t get regular doses to the entire world, you’re looking at a disaster of epic proportions. This is about logistics as well as production. Across the planet, one person in seven is starving not because the world doesn’t produce enough food, but because we can’t get food to all the people. And you really think that you can get a regular supply of this to everyone?”

Cheng’s face turned red with anger. “Yes, that is exactly what I think. This event will bind the human race together.”

Margaret saw the expression on his face, understood it — he was annoyed because she doubted his ability to save the planet. He wanted to see his face in the history books.

Careful what you wish for, Cheng…

“We can’t even bind Americans together, let alone the world,” she said. “And what are your plans for the people who refuse to take it, like the idiots who refuse to vaccinate their own children? What do you do when the companies that are so helpful now decide that they’ve done their part and they have to go back to business as usual?”

Cheng’s face furrowed into a tight-lipped scowl. “Doctor Montoya, this is the answer to the problem. We will find a way.”

Margaret wanted to grab his fat cheeks with both hands, twist his head, make him whine like the little weakling he was. She wanted to slap him.

“We have a chance at a permanent solution,” she said. “What about the hydra organism? There were ten people in that human artificial chromosome clinical trial — have you tracked down the other nine?”

Cheng leaned back. The scowl faded. He looked smug, like he’d defeated her argument merely by letting her say it out loud. He waited.

Murray answered her question.

“The president doesn’t like the hydra solution,” he said. “She doesn’t like the idea of introducing one unknown disease to fight another. And as you pointed out, it’s possible that the hydras are an airborne contagion — if we use them, they could spread uncontrollably and we have no idea what they might do. President Blackmon told us to focus on the yeast. If Cheng’s… excuse me, if Feely’s inoculant works, there’s no need to expose the population to an unknown organism.”

Her face felt hot. Now Murray was against her as well?

“Blackmon doesn’t like it,” she said.

Margaret knew what was happening. Cheng was sabotaging her work, whispering in the president’s ear. Margaret felt an intense anger welling up inside of her.

She stared at Cheng. “So the president doesn’t like it, eh, Cheng? And who gave her the idea that the hydras were so godawful dangerous, huh?”

Cheng’s eyes sparkled with delight.

“You did, Doctor Montoya,” he said. “Your reports labeled the hydras an incalculable risk.”

She blinked. Her reports had said that.

“But… but that was before,” she said. “Surely you’re not so incompetent you can’t see what we’re up against. We still don’t even know if Tim’s yeast works. And if it does, what if the disease evolves to beat it? We have to at least pursue the hydras as an alternate solution.”

Cheng shrugged. “We have some people seeing if they can track down other patients of the HAC study, but to be blunt, I don’t put much credence in your theory, Doctor Montoya. I hardly think infecting people with your contagious space worms is a viable solution.”

She reached her fist high and brought it down hard, pounded it on the table like a gavel.

“That’s the fucking point,” she said. “The hydras are contagious. If it is airborne, and I think it is, it will spread from person to person without your fucking bottles and goddamn distribution routes.”

Cheng leaned in, sure of himself. He had all the power and he knew it, relished it.

“We’ll look into it, Doctor Montoya. I appreciate what you’ve done so far, believe me, but there’s little you can do while you are isolated on that ship. My team is on the front lines. We’ll manage it from here.”

She stood so suddenly her chair shot from under her. “The front fucking lines? I’d like to come up there and see you face-to-face, you miserable, fat fuck. I’d like to cut off your motherfucking balls and fucking feed them to you. Would you like that, you stupid cunt?”

A hand on her shoulder: Clarence, reaching across the table, looking at her in shock and concern.

“Margaret, take it easy.”

She blinked. Her words played back in her head. Her face flushed red. Everyone was staring at her. She slowly sat back down.

Clarence turned to face Murray’s screen.

“Director Longworth, Doctor Montoya is under considerable stress.”

Murray nodded. He looked less than pleased.

“I can see that,” he said. “Doctor Montoya, get some rest. Doctor Cheng, assign more people to look at that stem cell therapy, as Doctor Montoya requested.”

Cheng couldn’t hide his smirk. He stared right at her.

“Of course, Director Longworth,” he said.

“Good,” Murray said. “That will be all.”

His side of the screen blanked out, leaving just Cheng’s face.

“Good day, Doctor Montoya,” he said. “Enjoy your time away.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Margaret said, then she stormed out of the mission module.

PORT

Cooper and José worked to tie the Mary Ellen Moffett to the long pier. Jeff was in the pilothouse, managing the fine maneuvering that brought the ship into place.

Waiting at their slip were three vehicles: a white van, a long, black limo and a pickup truck. Four Chinese men stood outside the white van. They wore jeans and sweatshirts, very nondescript, but Cooper wouldn’t have wanted to bump into any of them in a bar. Hands in pockets, shoulders shrugged against the cold — they clearly hadn’t understood that the temperature at the docks was usually the same as the temperature out on the water. Maybe they were here to help Steve and Bo Pan?

The pickup truck’s doors opened and two men — properly dressed against the cold in work jackets and insulated pants — stepped out. They had the burly look of dockworkers. They approached the Mary Ellen. Cooper had no idea who these men were, either. He noticed that when the dockworkers came forward, the Chinese men shrank back, just a little bit.

The limo was the most interesting of all: a man in a chauffeur suit — the driver, obviously — stood in front of it, a drop-dead-gorgeous woman on each arm. The women were laughing and smiling, but also shivering beneath thick fur coats. Past the hem of their coats, Cooper saw sparkly dresses and high heels.

The hanging bumpers on the Mary Ellen’s port side ground against the seawall.

Cooper was about to greet the two approaching men when a voice called out from behind him.

“Wait!”

He turned to see a bundled-up Steve Stanton rushing out of the cabin door. Steve ran across the deck, two overstuffed laptop bags strung around his shoulders. And not far behind Steve, Cooper saw Jeff descending from the bridge.

Steve slid to a stop, pointed at the dockworkers. “I hired these men,” he said in a rush. “And a bonus for you!” He pointed to the limo. Or maybe at the girls, Cooper wasn’t sure.

“A bonus?”

Steve nodded hard. “Yes! For such a good job. I have two nights at the Trump Tower for everyone! All paid for. The limo will take us there.”

Jeff joined them, a wide smile on his face.

“Stop the presses,” he said. “Did I hear you say you bought us two nights at the Trump Tower, and a limo ride with some girlies?”

Steve nodded furiously. He seemed overly hyped up. Stressed, maybe? His eyes kept darting to the cabin door. Was he waiting for Bo Pan?

“My way of saying thanks,” he said. “And maybe we can all get a beer after we check in?”

Cooper frowned. “You’re there, too?” Cooper just wanted to be rid of the guy who bothered Jeff so much. Although at the moment, Jeff couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t quit looking at the girls.

Again Steve’s eyes flicked to the door. He looked at Cooper, forced a smile.

“I need a break, too,” Steve said. “If I can hang out with you guys tonight, I’ll pay for one more day at our agreed rate. I really think I should, uh, be around you for a while.”

Cooper started to say no — he’d had his fill of Steve Stanton and this weird job — but Jeff put an arm around Steve’s shoulders and gave the smaller man a friendly, solid shake.

“Hell yes, you can hang out with us,” Jeff said. “Thanks for the gift, Steve! We appreciate it. Coop and I will show you all the good spots in town. Won’t we, Coop?”

Hours earlier, Jeff had wanted to get as far away from Steve Stanton as possible, and now he wanted to be the kid’s best friend? A couple of nights in a five-star hotel — and a limo loaded with some high-class ladies — could have that effect.

“Sure,” Cooper said. Cooper pointed up to the two dockworkers, who were standing at the edge of the pier, waiting for instructions. “Steve also hired these guys to help us unload.”

Jeff slapped Steve’s back, then invited the dockworkers aboard. He led them to the crane and gave them the rundown on how they’d off-load Steve’s crates.

Steve glanced to the cabin door again, and this time he froze. Cooper looked as well — Bo Pan was quickly approaching, a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside of it, Cooper knew, was the case recovered from the lake bottom. Bo Pan looked like he was trying to control his temper.

“Steve,” the old man said, “what is going on?”

Steve took a step away.

“I hired help for unloading,” he said.

Bo Pan looked to the dock, saw the white van, pointed at it. “We have help.”

“They’re not union,” Steve said. “We have to hire union labor in Chicago, right, Cooper?”

Cooper glanced at the Chinese men near the white van. They were edging closer, like they wanted to approach but were waiting for instructions. Bo Pan looked furious.

Cooper thought of pointing out that they could have unloaded themselves, and therefore didn’t need to hire help — union or otherwise — but Steve looked more than on edge… he looked afraid.

Steve was the one in charge, wasn’t he? Or had this all been some kind of strange sham all along? Was Bo Pan the one who called the shots? And if so, just how much trouble was Steve in?

“Steve is right,” Cooper said, following an instant instinct to protect the kid. “If you hire labor to unload, Bo Pan, they’ve got be union. This is Chicago, my friend.”

Bo Pan’s bony hands clutched into fists. Anger smoldered in his wrinkled eyes. He looked to the dock.

“I see,” he said. “And the limousine? And those women, standing there, watching us… are they union, too?”

“Steve gave us a bonus,” Cooper said. “In fact, Mister Stanton, why don’t you wait in the limo? We’ll be off-loaded in just a moment.”

Steve shook his head. “Uh… I’d rather stay on the ship with you and Jeff until everything is finished.”

That line made Bo Pan even angrier. He coughed up a wad of phlegm, spat it onto the deck, then started climbing out of the slightly moving boat onto the pier. Two of the Chinese men ran over to help him. One took the duffel bag. The man handled the bag delicately, reverently.

Bo Pan and the men got in the van, which quietly drove down the dock toward the pier gate.

Cooper turned to Steve.

“Want to tell me what that was all about?”

Steve shook his head. “No. I do not.” The kid looked like he might puke at any moment. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills and handed it to Cooper.

“Another part of your bonus.”

Cooper looked at it, dumbfounded. Another mad stack, another ten grand, just like that.

Steve started climbing out of the boat. Cooper had to help him, thanks to two computer bags, one of which was stuffed with two laptops.

As Steve walked to the limo, Cooper wondered what had just happened. He’d try to get it out of Steve later, if, indeed, Steve was really going to hang out.

Cooper turned, waved to José. The Filipino came running over.

“Yes, Jefe?”

“Big surprise,” Cooper said. “We’re all staying in the Trump Tower for the next two nights. All free, big guy.”

José’s smile faded. “A tower?”

“A hotel,” Cooper said. “Big one. Fancy as hell, from what I hear. Steve paid for it. We even get a limo ride.” He nodded toward the long, black car, the shivering girls.

José coughed, then sneezed. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Bless you,” Cooper said. “You okay?”

José shrugged. “Coming down with something. I think I’ll just go home. I miss my family.”

Cooper wanted to talk him into coming but could see there was no point. José missed his family, true, but he was also always paranoid of anything that involved giving ID or being around lots of strangers. The man was so hardworking, so at home on the boat; it was easy to forget that once on land, he didn’t have the same rights and privileges that Cooper and Jeff enjoyed.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “You need a ride anywhere?”

José shook his head. “My cousin is coming to get me. It’s just a two-hour drive to Benton Harbor, no problem.”

He coughed again, much harder this time. His eyes watered.

“Damn, dude,” Cooper said. “Maybe you should swing by a hospital and get that checked out.”

José cleared his throat, shook his head and smiled; he thought Cooper was joking.

Cooper felt like an idiot for the second time in as many minutes — José was as afraid of hospitals as he was of hotels. He probably feared that a trip to the hospital might turn into a visit with the INS. A ridiculous fear, Cooper knew, but then again he never had to deal with such concerns.

Cooper peeled off twenty one-hundred-dollar bills from the stack, handed them to José.

“Tell your cousin not to drive like a goddamn illegal, will ya?”

José’s face lit up in surprise. He put the money in his pocket. “Sometimes, Jefe Cooper, you’re a good guy — for a racist asshole, I mean. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Cooper said. “Great work. Now help get Steve’s crap off the boat, okay?”

José jogged over to join Jeff and the two dockworkers, who were already unloading Steve’s crate.

A tickle flared up in Cooper’s windpipe, a tickle that quickly turned into a small cough. He cleared his throat… felt a little scratchy.

Well, he wouldn’t let a little cold stop him from having one grade-A bitch of a good time.

Windy City? Here we come.

FREQUENT FLIERS

Bo Pan put a bottle of water and a tin of Sucrets on the counter.

The cashier grabbed it, ran it across the scanner, spoke to him without looking up.

“Hello, sir,” she said. “How are you today?” Her name tag said Madha. She held out her hand. “That will be seven fifty-five.”

Bo Pan adjusted the strap of his carry-on bag so he could get at his wallet, then handed over the money. When he did, his hand touched hers.

Neutrophils detected contact, reversed their grip, letting go of Bo Pan and clinging to Madha instead. In two days, she would kill her husband by driving the point of a clothes iron into the back of his skull.

“Would you like a bag, sir?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “No, thank you. I am fine.”

She offered him his change. “Thank you for shopping at Hudson News.”

He took his money, moved to the magazine rack. Bo Pan pretended to look at the covers showing bright cars, men with too much muscle or women showing too much skin. Americans certainly loved big breasts.

He tried hard to stay calm — his contact was late. His plane boarded in ten minutes.

What if Ling didn’t show?

He unwrapped a Sucret and popped it into his mouth. Cherry flavor. He liked that. His throat was scratchy, and it felt like he had a fever coming on.

Bo Pan heard the rattling of wheels rolling along the concourse’s tile floor. He looked up just as Ling rolled a dolly into Hudson News. The dolly held five blue plastic trays, each loaded with soft drinks. Ling met Bo Pan’s eyes but didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

Ling rolled his dolly of drinks toward the glass refrigerator.

Bo Pan turned quickly to follow; when he did, he bumped into Paulette Duchovny from Minneapolis. Bo Pan’s hand came up immediately, reactively touching Paulette’s bare forearm.

“Oh!” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”

Three hours from that moment, Paulette would be back in Minneapolis. Two days after that, she would infect seven other people, including her son, Mark, and her daughter, Cindy. Mark and Cindy would lock up the house and stand guard as Paulette transformed into something that was not fully human. Before the sun set on the fourth day, Paulette Duchovny would do what a voice in her head told her to do — she would murder a family of five in their home, ending the slaughter by gutting a three-month-old baby.

Paulette smiled at Bo Pan. “That’s okay, no problem.”

He nodded again, then walked to the refrigerator. Ling was already there, the glass door pinned open by his dolly. He was pulling bottles of Coke out of the plastic bins, then reaching into the refrigerator to place them behind the bottles that were already there.

Ling saw Bo Pan, then took a step back and gestured at the open refrigerator. “Go ahead, sir.”

“Thank you,” Bo Pan said. He grabbed a Coke.

“Oh,” Ling said, then reached down to the floor and picked up a black fanny pack. The pack’s pouch looked like it held something cylindrical, perhaps about the size of a travel mug.

He offered it to Bo Pan. “You dropped this.”

Bo Pan’s heart hammered in his chest. It couldn’t be this easy to get an object past the TSA. It simply could not. The CIA was here, somewhere, they were watching, waiting for him to take it. They would start shooting at any moment.

Bo Pan took the fanny pack. As he did, his left pinkie touched Ling’s right thumb.

In three days, Ling would be dead, a leaking bag of fluid slowly sloughing off of a prone skeleton. The infection would not properly work with his particular physiology, and he would slowly dissolve in a chain reaction of apoptosis. But before he died — and after he became contagious — Ling would stock a total of twenty-two airport refrigerators. He would leave mutated neutrophils on over three hundred bottles, neutrophils that would be nicely refrigerated until a hand touched them, or a pair of lips brushed against them.

Bo Pan turned and walked away, waiting to hear screams of get down on the floor! But all he heard were the normal sounds of an airport. He walked to his gate just as his group was boarding.

The last thing Bo Pan did before getting on the plane was to hand his ticket to Enrique Calderone, who lived in the Boystown area of Chicago.

In three days Enrique would grab a kitchen knife and chase his lover through their apartment building, slashing him on the shoulder, the forearm and the temple. His lover would run, leaving a long trail of blood, before finding a fire axe, which he would swing at Enrique’s stomach, burying the blade in Enrique’s ribs just under his left arm. Enrique would bleed to death a few feet away from his building’s laundry room.

As for the people on Flight 245, some of them would prove to be unlucky as well. By the end of the two-hour flight to Newark, seven of them would have touched a surface previously touched by Bo Pan. His neutrophils would already have penetrated their new hosts’ skin, would already be cutting open stem cells, rewriting DNA and starting the cycle anew.

Two of those people were on their way home to New York City. They would take the PATH train to Penn Station, then get on the F-train, one of them headed to the Upper East Side and the other to Queens.

Another passenger would transfer to a flight to North Carolina.

Another would board an El Al flight to Morocco.

A fifth was catching a red-eye to London.

The final two, like Bo Pan, were heading to Beijing.

He took his seat, almost giddy with success. He wore Ling’s fanny pack in the front. The pack would never be out of his sight or his touch.

After twenty-two years in America, he was finally going home. In fourteen hours, he would land as a national hero.

Unfortunately for Bo Pan, his body would not be able to handle the infection’s final transformation changes. He would not become one of the “Converted.” The process was already weakening an artery in his right temple, creating an aneurysm. In fourteen hours, yes, he would land as a hero of the people. In fifteen hours, that artery in his head would rupture, causing a stroke — he would die of a hemorrhage.

Bo Pan’s infection, however, would live on. Live on in the most densely populated nation on the planet.

THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN

Steve Stanton didn’t know how to handle his hurricane of emotions. Bo Pan would have killed Jeff, Cooper and José, probably with the help of those men at the dock. That alone felt terrifying. Add to that Steve’s guilt over the death of the navy diver. Steve’s creation killed the man, killed a soldier who wanted nothing more than to serve his country — just like Steve had wanted to do. Which, in turn, stirred up confusion; just which country was Steve’s, anyway? He’d grown up American. He’d never even been to China — how could he count that distant nation as his home?

Fear, guilt, confusion and a final emotion that, in contrast, made the others all the more intense: happiness.

He was out having a blast with Jeff Brockman and Cooper Mitchell, two men who in their younger days probably picked on and ridiculed guys like Steve. They had no idea that he’d saved their lives, and Jose’s as well. The five unexpected witnesses Steve hired — the two girls, their driver and the two dockworkers — had forced Bo Pan to leave the Moffett’s crew alive.

By now, Bo Pan was on a plane to New York, then London, and finally Beijing. He would probably never come back. Why would his bosses take the chance that Bo Pan could make a mistake, be picked up and interrogated, when they could just keep him in China and know his secrets would forever stay safe?

And if Bo Pan’s bosses sent Steve another handler? Well, Steve was the only one who could maintain and operate the Platypus, which meant he was probably safe. As for Cooper and Jeff? Now that Bo Pan had escaped the country with his prize in hand, Steve couldn’t think of a logical reason why someone would want them dead.

Still, Steve knew he would spend the rest of his life wondering if someone would come for him… and his parents, maybe. Someone who would want to tie up loose ends and silence anyone who knew anything.

Cooper and Jeff had picked up on Steve’s troubled thoughts and applied what seemed to be their cure-all for any affliction — drinking. The three of them sat in a booth at Monk’s Pub. This was their third stop of the night; Steve was already drunk. They’d had Old Style beer at a dive bar called Marie’s Riptide Lounge, then moved on to far more fancy trappings and expensive scotch at Coq D’Or and finally landed at Monk’s. Steve had lost track of the drinks he’d consumed. Three beers… or was it four? And those two shots… had they contained more than the standard one and a half ounces of liquor? Based on the way his head was swimming, it seemed like they had.

Monk’s was packed. Music blared. People laughed, shouted to be heard over the high level of noise. Steve wondered if it was loud enough to damage his hearing. One night wouldn’t do that much damage, he figured. Besides, tonight he wasn’t some nerd hanging out with his parents and family at the restaurant, he was partying. And the girls… so many girls, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, wearing jeans and tight sweaters or more revealing outfits they’d hidden under heavy winter coats. Steve glanced over to the bar, to a blond girl with glasses he’d been staring at earlier.

She was staring back at him. She smiled.

Jeff smacked Steve in the arm.

“Too bad about those limo ladies, my friend,” Jeff said. He wore jeans, a black belt and a black AC/DC concert T-shirt that showed off his lean biceps and muscle-packed forearms. “I can’t believe you hired actual models instead of escorts. I mean, they were escorts, sure, but not escort-escorts.”

A tap on his other arm: Cooper. He also wore jeans, but with a gray sweater that made him look like a college professor.

“Jeff is a sad panda because you didn’t hire hookers,” Cooper said.

“I’m not sad,” Jeff said. “Just saying a little limo-shag is never a bad thing. Hey, Steve-O, you going to pick out something to eat, or what? We need to get some food in you or you’re going to pass out on us, and there’s way more drinking to be done!”

Steve picked up the menu sitting on the table in front of him. He tried to concentrate on it, but it blurred in and out of focus.

“Maybe a burger,” he said. “Cooper, are you having a burger?”

Jeff laughed. “A burger? For that hippie? Maybe there’s some grass in here for him to graze on.”

Steve looked at Cooper. Cooper shrugged.

“I’m a vegetarian,” he said. “Jeff can’t quite comprehend why anyone wouldn’t want to consume the flesh of animals raised as captives and then butchered, screaming in agony.”

Jeff crossed his arms, affected a look of utter disgust. “Dead animals are God’s gift to man. Beef is delicious. Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.”

The waitress appeared, carrying three beers.

“You boys ready to order?”

Cooper closed his menu. “Roasted vegetable salad, please.”

“Cheeseburger,” Jeff said. “Make it moo.”

Steve stared at his menu, but the words again fuzzed to the point where he couldn’t read them.

The menu suddenly flew from his hands. Jeff had yanked it away and closed it.

“Stanton, enough rinky-dinking around,” he said. Jeff turned to the waitress. “My man here is having a cheeseburger, medium. And may I say, your eyes absolutely sparkle in this light.”

The waitress winked. “Smooth talker. Won’t get you out of giving me an obnoxious tip.”

“Don’t worry,” Jeff said. “My tip is always oversized.”

The waitress shook her head, but she had to hold back a laugh. If Steve had said a line like that, he would have been slapped. Not that he could ever actually say something like that in the first place.

The waitress walked off.

Jeff pointed to Steve’s glass. “Get at that beer, bitch! It ain’t gonna drink itself!”

Cooper rolled his eyes. “By bitch, he means Mister Stanton.”

“Here,” Jeff said, picking up his glass, “let me show you how a real man does it.” He tipped the glass back and drank the whole thing in one pull. He set it down hard enough on the table to make the other drinks slosh a little. He belched.

“Boom!” Jeff pointed at Cooper’s mug. “Coop, get to gettin’! You, too, Steve-O! Knock it back!”

Steve glanced to the bar, to the girl, saw that she was still watching, still smiling. He didn’t want the girl to think he was a wimp, so he lifted the glass.

“I have to drink the whole thing?”

Cooper shook his head. “No, you don’t.” He shot Jeff a stern look. “This isn’t a frat party, right, Jeff?”

“Phi-drinky-drinky,” Jeff said. “What’s the matter, Steve? Are you a puh-puh-puh-pussy?”

Steve looked at the full glass of beer in his hand. If Jeff had done it, then so could he. He tipped the glass back. He swallowed once, twice, then his throat got so cold but he kept swallowing. Jeff screamed “go-go-go” as Steve drained the glass and set it on the table.

Jeff raised his arms high. “Winnah!”

Cooper rolled his eyes again, but clapped lightly. “You two can hang out all night. Clearly you’ve got the same testosterone problem.”

Jeff stood. “Boys, don’t go anywhere.” He walked to the bar, leaving Steve and Cooper alone.

“So, Steve,” Cooper said, “you having a good time?”

Steve nodded. His head felt all heavy and loose. “Yes. But I think I may have drunk too much.”

“I can see that. I’ll make sure you get back to the hotel safe. Now, you want to tell me what was going on back on the Mary Ellen?”

Steve felt the elation drain from his body. Why did Cooper have to bring that up now?

Cooper leaned across the table. “If Bo Pan is messing with you, maybe Jeff and I can help.”

He looked so honest, so open. Steve thought about telling him the whole story, right there and then.

And then Jeff returned, the girl with glasses at his side. Jeff slid in next to Cooper, the girl with glasses sat down next to Steve.

“Boys, meet Becky,” Jeff said. “Becky just so happens to be one of my favorite names.”

Cooper seemed to forget all about the discussion; he looked hungrily at Becky. “A lovely name to accompany a lovely face,” he said.

Becky laughed, covering her mouth with her hand. Her blond hair bounced and swayed.

Jeff and Cooper seemed so at ease with girls, so natural, like they’d done this a thousand times.

Jeff reached across the table and grabbed Steve’s shoulder.

“Steve, Becky and I have a bet,” he said. “She bet me that you can’t drink a shot of Jäger.”

Cooper groaned. “Jesus, Jeff, what are you trying to do, kill our boss?”

Jeff slapped the table. “She didn’t think our boss could drink his shot! I said, Becky, you are a dirty whore with the diseased snatch of a smelly pirate hooker!”

Steve’s jaw dropped, but Becky laughed even harder. She looked at Steve, smiled a sexy smile.

They were calling him boss… for Becky’s benefit? To make him seem more important in her eyes?

The beautiful girl put her elbows on the table, leaned closer. Her shoulder touched Steve’s.

“You guys are way older than he is,” she said. “Are you sure he’s your rich boss, or are you running a line on me?”

Cooper put his hand on his chest. “Madam, you offend me. I assure you, Mister Stanton has more money than we could count in a week. Maybe even two weeks. It’s just that much. Not only is he smart, well-off, insanely good-looking, staying at the Trump Tower because he’s fancy and fine, but he’s also an adventurer — we’re back from several days at sea.”

Steve held up a finger. “It was a lake.”

“Several days at lake,” Cooper said. “Right you are, boss.”

The waitress returned, plunked down four shot glasses filled with black liquid. Those were definitely more than one and a half ounces.

Becky smiled at Steve. “The bet is that if you can drink one of these, I have to kiss you.”

Steve stared. He swallowed. “And if I can’t?”

Becky leaned even closer. “Then you have to kiss me.”

Yes, this was really happening. Drunk or not, this was really happening.

Steve grabbed the glass, tilted his head back and poured it all in. His mouth rebelled almost instantly — how awful! It tasted like moldy licorice. It burned going down. He felt his stomach roil, but he wasn’t going to throw up in front of the prettiest girl he’d ever spoken to.

He turned the glass over and set it on the table, the awful taste still clinging to the inside of his mouth and his nose as well.

Becky put her hand on his chest, pushed him lightly until his back pressed against the booth seat. She turned to her right, then raised slightly and slid backward into Steve’s lap.

“You win,” she said. She kissed him, slow and warm. Steve’s body seemed to melt. Becky’s hand held the back of his head as her tongue slid into his mouth. He felt himself grow hard instantly, knew that she felt it, too, and she didn’t move away. He heard Jeff screaming something supportive yet obscene, but Steve’s world narrowed to the kiss, to the girl.

This was the greatest night ever.

As Steve, Cooper and Jeff partied, they couldn’t know what was happening to their bodies. Jeff, in particular, couldn’t know of the microscopic, amoebalike organisms on his palms, his fingertips. He couldn’t know that on everything he touched — and everyone he touched — he left these moving vectors of disease.

A waitress picked up a glass: contact.

The bartender put his hand on the bar where Jeff had done the same only moments earlier: contact.

A drunk man bumped into Jeff, then they shook hands to make sure no one was upset: contact.

Jeff made out with a woman who had put in a long day at the office and just needed to blow off some steam: contact.

That night, two dozen people would leave the bar with crawlers already burrowing under their skin, already seeking out stem cells…

…already changing them into something else.