The Calm Before The Swarm

I

Atlanta, Georgia

Lauren returned to her lab on the third floor of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, forty-two miles from the fairgrounds, in time to watch the sun rise. It was the perfect time to be there, the only time when she could clearly think. The CDC was adding more than twenty thousand square feet onto the building to accommodate the new class IV cleanrooms necessary to keep up with the slew of nasty diseases that seemed to crop up in increasing numbers every year. The construction crews with their infernal hammering and drilling and pounding, which positively made the floor vibrate, wouldn't be arriving for more than two hours, so they needed to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Physically, she was exhausted, but mentally she was firing on all cylinders. There was so much to be done that she could hardly slow down to think about it while moving from one task to the next. The entire lab was a frenzy of activity. Lab techs bounced from one station to the next. Centrifuges whirled and mass spectrometers hummed. Carcasses were dissected with microscopic guidance. Tissue samples were stained and run through a gamut of tests. It was a precisely orchestrated performance that undoubtedly looked chaotic to the untrained eye, but to Lauren, it was poetry in motion; an elaborate dance by men and women who had never rehearsed this particular version. There was no protocol in place for evaluating this specific vector. Wasps had never been known to transmit such a nasty pathogen, and their toxin wasn't especially aggressive. Even people who were deathly allergic to bee stings rarely reacted to those of a wasp. And yet here they were, improvising as they went, attacking these little black creatures on the atomic level.

So far, they had yet to find the presence of any viral or bacterial agents, which was the most important step. It was ultimately too soon to conclusively rule out the presence of any or all pathogenic processes, but Lauren figured it was only a matter of time now.

What they had found, however, was truly extraordinary.

With the help of Dr. Reginald Wilton, professor of Agricultural Technology and resident entomologist at Georgia Tech, they had thoroughly examined the anatomy of the wasps and made some startling revelations. This was no naturally occurring species they were dealing with here, but an amalgam of several. The general body type was consistent on a macroscopic level with that of the common paper wasp---minus the structure of the stinger array---while the coloration more closely resembled that of a parasitic digger wasp. That was where it passed from strange to remarkable.

A wasp's stinger was more than simply a mechanism for delivering venom. It was an ovipositor, a functional tube used to deposit eggs. Thus, only the females of any given species had stingers. Colonial wasps produced a single queen capable of laying eggs, while all of the other females were essentially born sterile. Apparently wasps had a staggering amount of control in determining the sex of their offspring. Every egg was naturally haploid, which meant it would always yield a female. After fertilization, however, it became diploid and always produced a male. And all of the carcasses they had found were viable females, as evidenced by their missing stingers and the fully-developed egg sacs in their abdomens. This suggested that the wasps weren't colonial at all, like their hive-building cousins, but parthenogenic, capable of reproducing entire generations of females asexually. In that regard, they were like the parasitic wasps of the Apocrita suborder, which were commonly released in fields of crops to control the infestation of pest insects. These species of wasps used their stingers to deliver a paralyzing dose of venom into other insects like caterpillars and spiders, and while the insect was incapacitated, laid their eggs directly into its body. The larvae then developed until they were effectively able to kill and consume their host.

The structure of this new hybrid's ovipositor assembly mimicked that of a honey bee. All stingers have microscopic hooks along the stylet called lancets that enable them to latch onto their prey long enough to deliver their venom before retracting. Bees have larger lancets. That's the reason they lose their ovipositors after stinging a human being; the skin is too thick and tough to allow the lancets to disengage, which causes the bee to simply tear off its entire reproductive system in an effort to fly away. From there, it's only a matter of time before the insect dies.

Its mandibles were much larger, sharper, and attached to more elaborate musculature than that of a standard wasp. They looked more like those of a termite, which were designed for chewing through hard wood, only proportionate to the wasp's body size. There was no doubt they were easily strong enough to masticate mammalian tissue.

There were other bizarre mutations as well. Normal venom contains a toxin called melittin, plus various concentrations of apamine, hyaluronidase, phospholipases and phosphatases, and degranulating proteins. This particular species had only a fraction of the melittin in its venom sac, which meant that its vasoactive properties were markedly subdued. One sting wouldn't cause the victim's throat to swell shut, or produce hives, dizziness or loss of consciousness while the wasp laid its eggs. It would literally take dozens of stings to cause death to the average person without an acute allergy.

Their antennae were dramatically different as well. Instead of having a long distal portion called a flagellum, which was ordinarily composed of eight discrete sections that helped the wasp recognize different sounds, there was only a small nub, which, they could only assume, was able to identify a single tone.

They were dealing with a wasp that looked like a hybridization of a paper wasp and a digger wasp, had the ovipositor of a honey bee connected to the parthenogenic reproductive system of a parasitic wasp, with oddly short antennae attuned to a particular resonance of sound, the mandibles of a termite, and weaker venom than any single one of its constituent components. A finely-tuned machine capable of infesting a host without immediate detriment...and of killing an entire crowd of spectators in a matter of seconds.

This species wasn't the result of random mutation or selective breeding. This was something that could only have been engineered in a lab.

But how had it gone from that lab into the belly of a circus elephant? And how long had they been growing in its digestive tract?

The elephant hadn't been attacked by a swarm. It would have been killed like everything else under the big top. It had to have been stung repeatedly under controlled conditions for so many eggs to have hatched inside of it. The elephant's sickly affect prior to its death had to have been caused by the mature insects that surely must have been crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in its bowels. It wouldn't have been able to eat or defecate. The wasps had been causing it to slowly starve to death while they waited for the stimulus that triggered them to chew their way out of its gut.

Everyone at the fairgrounds last night had been killed by someone who had invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into the creation and release of the wasps. Not just killed, but murdered in a cold, calculating manner that had taken countless years of hard work in a laboratory far more advanced than even Lauren's to plan and implement.

That was why they all now worked as fast and as diligently as they could.

They needed to figure out the motive behind using the wasps to murder hundreds of people at a circus in a town that barely warranted inclusion on the map.

Everything hinged upon it.

They needed to know why.