“Not even close,” Tim said. “Whatever made her sick, it made her so sick she stopped eating. She’s the only one showing these symptoms, so I’ll see if something is wrong with the IV setup. Maybe the pump broke or the needle jammed.”
Jian looked at the other cows. They all looked fine. Then she saw something move in stall forty-one. Coldness blossomed in her chest. A tiny plastic baby-doll hand reached over the stall divider. A black-and-orange tiger paw appeared a few inches to its left.
“No,” Jian said in an inaudible whisper.
The mismatched arms shivered. A black head slowly appeared from behind the wall. Jian shut her eyes tight and jabbed her thumbs into her stomach, sending a wave of dull pain up her body. She gave her head one shake, then opened her eyes.
The thing was gone.
“Jian,” Rhumkorrf said sharply. She jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to face him.
“Jian, did you hear me?” He looked annoyed. Mister Feely looked disgusted.
“No, Doctor Rhumkorrf. What did you say?”
“I asked what you thought of this.”
Jian quickly looked at the sick cow, then back at Rhumkorrf. “Mister Feely is right, the rapid fetus growth is making the cow sick.”
Tim inserted a new IV needle into Molly’s neck. “I’m going to crank up her intravenous feeding,” he said. “Hopefully that will normalize her metabolism enough for her to start eating again. I’ll increase all the cows’ food another twenty-five percent. I think that sometime during the night Molly became sick enough to stop eating, and her body started breaking down muscle in order to sustain the fetus. From there, the situation cascaded.”
“We need to set up checks every two hours,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’ll have to create a rotation with the nonimportant staff.”
Tim shook his head. “I can do you one better, bro-hem. I’ll program their monitors to watch for altered vitals, tie that into the security room computer. Something goes wrong, the security dude on staff gets beeped, zooms in with a camera, then gives us a holler. Easy.”
Jian shook her head. “No. Just let them die.”
Rhumkorrf glared at her.
Tim nodded slowly. “Fuckin’ A right,” he said.
“Wrong,” Rhumkorrf hissed, the word long and drawn out. Jian took a half step back.
“These animals will not die,” Rhumkorrf said. “And if they do, I swear to God that I will destroy both of your careers. Timothy, the only way you will get near a lab is if you’re pushing a mop. And Jian, I promise you that when they take you back to China, you will spend the rest of your life rotting away in an insane asylum.”
Rhumkorrf’s eyes were wide and angry. A sneer bent his upper lip. Hateful. She had to look away. And when she did, Rhumkorrf turned his gaze on Tim. Tim looked down—all of his bluster, all of his threats of violence, gone.
Rhumkorrf walked back to the aft ladder and climbed to the second deck. Jian said nothing. She had to do something to stop all of this, but what? Mister Colding wanted her to shut up. Doctor Rhumkorrf just didn’t want to listen. Mister Feely was all talk. Sara? She wasn’t one of the decision makers.
Jian couldn’t rely on anyone. She knew what she had to do. The only question was, did she have the courage to do it?
NOVEMBER 27: NICE ENDO
Implantation +18 Days
COLDING WAS GETTING the hang of snowmobiling, and, he had to admit, he liked it. A swarm of sleds shot down the snowpacked road toward the docks—Magnus and Andy out in front, Alonzo and the Twins next, then Colding, with Sara bringing up the rear.
She hung back a little in case Colding had problems. Wasn’t exactly rocket science to drive one, but like anything else a sled took some getting used to. The brakes on a car or motorcycle usually weren’t applied while driving thirty miles an hour across snow or ice, for example.
Up ahead, the road crested the snow-covered dune that marked the harbor. Colding’s eyes widened as he saw Magnus and Andy accelerate up the dune and fly off it, trailing comet-tails of powder through open air before they vanished behind the dune’s far side. ’Zo and the Twins took the crest more conservatively, keeping their sleds on the ground as they went over. Colding slowed and stopped a good fifty yards shy of the dune.
Sara slid to a stop next to him. “You like what you see there?” Her smile blazed in the afternoon sun. Even with goggles covering her eyes and a helmet hiding her hair and ears, she looked stunning. The helmet didn’t hide those freckles.
He looked back to the dune. That much air under Magnus’s sled seemed terrifying, but it also seemed like a crapload of fun. “How do you land without killing yourself?”
“You push off when you hit the crest. Keep your feet flat on the runners, but keep your knees bent. Push down with your legs when you land, it absorbs the shock.”
“Sounds like jumping a dirt bike.”
She nodded. “If you’ve jumped a bike, you know how it works. I’ll go side by side with you, just match my speed.”
Colding shook his head. “What if I wreck the sled?”
“I’m pretty sure Genada can afford a new one. Don’t be a pussy.” Sara gunned her snowmobile and shot away, engine whining. Colding squeezed his throttle tight. The sled rocketed forward so fast he almost fell off. These things were flat-out built for speed. He caught up to Sara at the base of the dune. The upward slope pushed him down into his seat. Still accelerating, he hit the crest and pushed off.
Weightless. Exhilarating. The harbor spread out before him, white and blue, the Otto II bobbing slowly in the light chop. The sled dropped down. He bent his knees, then pushed.
Jarring impact, body stunned, limp and flopping. More weightlessness, not the good kind, then a smack that rattled his head inside the helmet. Sliding facedown. Something cold in his neck and left shoulder.
No more motion.
“Fuck,” Colding said.
“Hey!” Sara’s voice. “Are you okay?”
He pushed himself to a sitting position. As he did, he felt packed snow fall from his snowsuit neck down his shirt and over his stomach. Sara crouched in front of him, helmet now off, eyes filled with concern.
“I think I’m okay,” he said. He pulled off his gloves, unzipped the suit and started fishing inside his shirt for the ice-cold snow. “Nothing hurt but my pride.”
“You looked sexy,” Sara said. “You know, right up until that whole landing thing.”
Colding laughed and stood. His snowmobile had wound up on its side, clear plastic windscreen cracked from the crash. He put it back on its treads. Other than the windscreen, it looked no worse for wear. Sara’s sled, of course, had no damage. “I see you landed like a pro.”
“I’ve been riding since high school,” Sara said. “An old boyfriend from Gaylord taught me.”
“You dated a gay lord?”
“It’s a town, dumb-ass. Just south of Cheboygan. Big rivals in high school football. I was a sophomore dating a senior from a rival school… so scandalous. He used to take me snowmobiling all the time.”
“What was his name?”
Sara started to speak, then stopped. “Crap, I had it. Man, that was what, almost twenty years ago? Ah! Don Jewell. See? Sharp as a tack despite my advanced years.”
“You still in touch with him?”
She shook her head. “Haven’t talked to him since high school. No idea what happened to him.”
The sound of the Nuge’s diesel engines drew their attention. Clayton’s snowproof vehicle crested the dune at a modest speed, then continued toward the dock. Out at the dock, Colding saw the others already at work unloading the Otto II. Magnus, Andy, Sara’s crew, Sven, James and Stephanie Harvey. They hauled metal poles, rolls of heavy chain-link fence and bags of concrete from the ship to the base of the dock. Mookie the dog ran around, barking, kicking up chest-high waves of snow before stopping every twenty or thirty feet, standing tall, snow-covered black ears up high and black eyes searching the tree line for some imagined threat to her master.