“You won’t do this!” Waingro cried, waving the gun and firing randomly again. “Don’t even try! I’m warning you!”
The other guard rushed the man; he fired, but missed, and the guard tackled him. The first guard joined in and a massive struggle ensued. It was punctuated by the loud sound of another gunshot—and then silence.
The two guards, lying on top of the man, got up to reveal Waingro on the ground, arms splayed, gun still gripped in his right hand, the top half of his head shot away, brains sliding out into a widening pool of blood. In the struggle, he had evidently fired the gun inadvertently into his own head.
Gideon looked on in horror. There was something wrong—even more wrong than this awful sight would account for. Just as he felt McFarlane pull him roughly back, he saw what it was; there were gasps and expostulations of horror and disgust as others saw it, too. People backed away, shouting and shrieking.
Wriggling free of the man’s ruptured brain, covered with blood and gray matter and membrane, was a dark-gray worm-like thing. As it thrashed free, it opened a tiny mouth, exposing a single sharp tooth; cut itself free; and then began to slither away.
44
DR. PATRICK BRAMBELL looked down at the dead body of Waingro, Sax’s lab assistant, lying on a gurney, still dressed and bloody from the tragedy that had occurred just a few minutes earlier in mission control. Dr. Sax stood beside him. Neither had been present at the disturbance. But the word was out, and the entire ship was in an uproar. Garza had demanded an immediate autopsy and a report on the worm, or tentacle, or whatever the abomination was that had slithered out of the man’s brain.
“Dear me,” muttered Sax, gazing at the body. “What a mess.”
But Brambell’s attention wasn’t on the body itself; it had been arrested by the worm-like thing. Security had brought it down sealed in a stainless-steel tray with a glass top. Brambell felt a shudder pass through him as he looked at it. Following the melee in the control room, it had almost escaped, but at the last minute someone had recovered sufficiently from shock to slam a trash can over it, trapping it.
And here it was: a gray worm-like creature, about the diameter of a pencil and six inches long. It was wriggling about in the container, methodically exploring every nook and corner, clearly looking for escape routes. The head of the organism appeared to have two glittering black eyes, and between them a round mouth with a single razor-sharp black tooth protruding, made, it appeared, of a substance that resembled obsidian or glass.
“Dr. Brambell?” Sax asked. “Shall we begin?” Her hair was tucked under a cap and she was in full scrubs, as was he. They had established a formal relationship, which Brambell liked. Sax was both a PhD and an MD, and Brambell felt a little undereducated around her. One thing was certain—she was a lot better suited for this task, academically and emotionally, than his own lily-livered medical assistant, Rogelio.
He glanced over the large tray standing between them, neatly arranged with autopsy tools: #22 scalpels, skull chisels, rib cutters, forceps, scissors, Hagedorn needles, a long knife, and the obligatory Stryker saw.
Brambell did a visual inspection of the body. The video camera was running. He spoke his observations aloud, describing the head wound, the ingress and egress of the round, the state of the brain, and various other factors.
“Cut away the clothing, if you please, Dr. Sax?”
Sax began slicing off the clothes, putting them aside. Except for the mess that had been made of the head, the body was clean and in good shape. Brambell adjusted the overhead operating light.
“There’s something odd here,” Sax said. “With the nose.”
Brambell took an otoscope, switched it on, and looked inside the nasal cavity. “What’s this? It’s some kind of injury.”
He handed the otoscope to Sax. She took a look. “I think this is where the, ah, worm must have entered. Look—the nasal septum is damaged and the cribriform plate of the ethmoid bone has been pierced. Drilled through, almost. The hole is the same diameter as the worm.”
Brambell took the instrument back, examined the nose more closely, and then—quite unconsciously—glanced in the direction of the worm.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
The creature had stopped exploring the container. It seemed to have settled down, its “head”—for want of a better term—in one corner of the stainless-steel box. He heard a faint scritching noise.
Pulling down his glasses, Brambell peered closer. The thing was using its tooth to scrape away at the stainless-steel wall of its container. It looked at first like a hopeless task—what tooth could cut steel?—but then he could see that it was, indeed, scraping tiny curls of metal from the wall. Slowly, but surely, it was making a hole.
“Dear God,” said Sax, looking over his shoulder.
“Indeed.”
Without another word, Brambell grabbed the ship’s phone and called the prep lab that, for security purposes, was now housing all the other tentacle specimens—in stainless-steel cases.
He looked at Sax. “No answer.”
“The lab’s probably locked up. Call security.”
Brambell called security, told them to check on the specimens immediately—and to be careful. He hung up. “What now?”
They exchanged glances for a moment before Sax answered. “Let’s dissect this little bugger before it escapes. The cadaver can wait.”
“A most excellent suggestion.” Brambell tried not to think about what the silence in the prep lab might mean.
He picked up the container and carried it across the room to the dissection chamber, mightily glad as he did so that the retrofitting designers of the ship had thought to include this unusual hooded and sterile dissection stage. He raised the hood and placed the latched container inside. The thing was disturbed by being moved; it reared up and displayed its black tooth, its head swaying back and forth menacingly.
“It’s like a damn viper,” Sax said.
Brambell shut and locked the hood. The dissection chamber had two sleeves, which manipulated remote dissection tools. Having inserted his forearms into the sleeves, Brambell used the manipulators to unlatch the box. The thing lashed out immediately, striking at the manipulator but bouncing off. It struck again and then wriggled out of the box, slithering fast across the space until it hit the wall, and then began exploring it, pushing and probing once again with its tooth.
Despite his best efforts, Brambell felt his hands begin to tremble. He had to fix the thing to the dissection surface—and the sooner the better. It was slithering all over the place, constantly in motion. Using the manipulator, he picked up a heavy dissection pin, hovered over the worm; and then—when it came into target range—he brought it down with a sudden movement, stabbing the worm and pinning it to the soft plastic surface.
With a faint but hideous squeal, the thing began lashing about, striking the pin with its tooth again and again.
Breathing hard, Brambell stuck in another needle, and then another, and another, until the thing was pinned almost as if sewn to the plastic board, yet still wriggling frantically, its mouth opening and closing, the tooth sweeping toward the gleaming pins that held it in place.
“Bring over the stereozoom,” he said.
Sax wheeled over the microscope, used for fine dissection, and began to position it. She turned it on and an attached videoscreen popped to life, showing a blurry, magnified image of the worm. She adjusted both the focus and the zoom until the image was sharp and at the desired magnification.
“Amazing that it refuses to die,” murmured Brambell, fitting the eyepieces of the microscope to his face and inserting his hands again into the manipulators. He picked up a scalpel and positioned it at the posterior end of the pinned, but still frantically flexing, worm. He inserted the edge of the scalpel into the tip of the creature and began to make a lengthwise incision, opening it up from tail to head. The skin was hard, and it almost seemed to Brambell as if he were cutting through plastic. The creature made another squealing sound, louder this time. The cut exposed its insides, a grouping of bizarre internal organs—if they could even be called organs, given that they looked more like bundles of wires and translucent fiber optics, along with clusters of shiny black balls, like bunches of tiny grapes. The internal workings were, oddly, without color—a range of blacks, grays, and whites.