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.”