Karnage’s mind was reeling from the mental assault. “Wait. How do you know so much about the squidbugs?”
Sydney took a breath, as if she’d been dreading this. “He’s been studying them,” she said.
“Oh yes,” the drone beside Karnage’s head chirped. “Quite extensively, if I may be so bold.”
“How extensively?” Karnage asked.
“Would you like me to show you?”
“Please,” Karnage said. “Do.”
The drone clapped its tendrils. “Excellent!” It turned to Sydney. “Please be a dear and let the good major up.”
Sydney looked warily at Karnage. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“I do,” Karnage said.
“As do I.” The drone beside Sydney patted her on the arm. “You have been outvoted, my dear.”
Sydney moved beside Karnage’s bed and prepared to tap him on the neck. “I’ve always hated democracy,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
A drone led Karnage and Sydney out of the room and down a spiral staircase. They came out into the glare of sunlight, at the base of a water tower. The tower was in the shape of Dabby Tabby’s head, the oval windows making up the cat’s long-faded eyes. Streaks of rust ran down its face. The words WELCOME TO LAKE DABNEY were still visible across Dabby’s forehead.
The water tower stood in the middle of an abandoned amusement park. Twists of sagging roller coaster stretched across the sky, threatening to give way and fall on their heads. The bright colours of the fairground had long faded to a dull grey. Splash pads stood empty and cracked. Bright red water slides had faded to sickly pink in the harsh sunlight. Tattered canopies on sagging shelters leaned against each other like drunkards so that the whole compound looked like a teetering house of cards that threatened to fall down if you looked at it funny.
“What kind of idiot builds a waterpark in the desert?” Karnage said.
“Waterpark?” Sydney said. “What is this waterpark you speak of?”
“The one we’re standin’ in,” Karnage said.
“You must be mistaken,” Sydney said. “There is no waterpark.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We’re standin’ right in the middle of it!”
“Nope,” Sydney said. “Must be your imagination. The Dabney Corporation never built a waterpark. Especially one that failed catastrophically. Not here. Not anywhere. If they did, people would know about it. And they don’t. And that has nothing to do with the Dabney Corporation wiping their failures off the record books. Because the Dabney Corporation never makes a mistake. Never does anything wrong. Go ahead. Ask them. They’ll set you straight.”
“Okay, I get it. Thank you, Madame Sarcasm.”
“Are you sure?” Sydney said. “I could go on.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“This way, if you please.” The drone led them towards a cracked concrete building. A sagging fish-shaped sign read JOURNEY UNDER THE SEA. They entered the dark building, its cool concrete walls a relief from the harsh desert sun. The drone led them through a long grey tunnel, their only company the echo of their own footsteps. The tunnel walls changed from crumbling concrete to an arched corridor of scratched acrylic. Beyond the tunnel walls lay an entire alien world. Karnage recognized orange creeper hanging from a grey alien tree, its branches twitching like fingers. Giant purple ladybugs scuttled through the pinkstink undergrowth, hiding behind massive blue seed pods that swelled and exhaled plumes of yellow mist. Occasionally a drone appeared through the yellow gloom, repositioning a purple lady bug, or pruning a bit of creeper before disappearing back into the mist. They reminded Karnage of old women tending their gardens.
The drone stroked the glass with a tendril. Its lens zoomed in towards the enclosure. “Such fine specimens. It’s taken me so long to develop this collection. To think it all started with just a few spore samples. They matched nothing in the records. They weren’t even carbon-based life forms. They were sulphur-based. At least, in the beginning. Then they did something marvellous. Something I still can’t quite explain. They became compatible with carbon-based life. You recall the Carpathian Flu epidemic?”
“No,” Karnage said.
“I do,” Sydney said. “It killed thousands. Took ’em years to come up with a vaccine.”
“That wasn’t a vaccine,” the drone said. “It was a genetic modifier, designed to improve our compatibility with the spores. They were the cause of it, you know. Not the Carpathians.”
“It’s always easier to blame Carpathia,” Karnage said.
The drone bobbed, as if nodding. “Better to blame Carpathia than admit the truth: they were taking the first steps to adapting us to the alien DNA.”
“I thought you said the squidbugs were adapting to us?” Karnage said.
The drone nodded. “They were. And we, in turn, have been adapting to them.”
Karnage gazed out into the misty alien landscape and scowled. “Evolution at work.”
The drone’s lens flickered, as if blinking in surprise. “Oh no. There is nothing natural about these selections.” The drone turned towards the glass. “Look at these creatures. They have been adapted so perfectly to life on this planet. One establishes a foothold, subtly alters its environs, allowing the next in the chain to establish a foothold. Each successive creature becomes more and more complex, until…” The drone stared into the mist, adjusted its lens as if searching for something. “Now where is he?”
A soft shadow was just barely visible through the gloom, shambling slowly. The drone tapped the glass excitedly. “Here, Fido. Come here.”
The shadow stopped, as if listening, then drew back, and disappeared into the mist.
It burst out of the fog, and slammed into the glass, scratching at it with its claws. It snarled and screeched, its skin flashing a deep crimson red.
It was a squidbug.
“This is my latest acquisition,” the drone said cheerily. “I only picked him up about a week ago. I’m hoping that he completes my collection. Admittedly, this collection still requires the horned worms and winged leviathans, but they’re simply far too large to keep in this enclosure. One must make sacrifices after all.”
The squidbug snarled and scratched at the glass, pounding at it with its fists. The tentacles around its mouth splayed out, revealing a sharp beak. It turned to bite and snap at the glass, its twin tongues slithering out, smearing slime across the glass.
“I’ve never seen one so enraged,” Sydney said.
“That’s because it has been cut off,” the drone said. “These creatures do not act of their own free will. There is a guiding force behind everything they do. They are analogous to workers and warriors in a giant ant colony. There is something—a queen of sorts—that guides the entire ecosystem. These creatures adapt and change to their environment almost instantly. They have been engineered by some sort of intelligence, and that intelligence continues to mold them as the infestation progresses.”
“How?” Karnage said. “How do they do it?”
The drone shot out a hologram of a rotating three-dimensional graph of gyrating squiggles. As Karnage saw it from different angles, he was reminded of the squiggles on Cookie’s arms.
“The alien infestation uses ultra-violent transmissions,” the drone said.
“Don’t you mean ultra-violet?” Sydney said.
The hologram disappeared and the drone turned its lens towards Sydney. “Absolutely not. I meant ultra-violent. Ultraviolent transmissions are unique to this invasion. They are actively assaulting the electromagnetic spectrum, intermittently obliterating and inserting themselves between the extreme ultraviolet and super ultra-violet wavelengths. Theoretically, this should be impossible. And in practice, it often is. Yet this unique band consistently and continuously shows up in my data, usually in erratic oscillations measured in yoctosecond bursts. Millions of orders come in on each burst. One for each and every creature in the invasion, right down to the smallest bacterium.”