It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.
The Platypus flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.
A threat, or, an opportunity.
For the second time, the Platypus shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.
It watched.
SCARY PERRY
She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.
“Hello, Perry.”
Perry Dawsey smiled.
They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.
They had touched Perry.
He was going to die. He knew that.
“Hey, Margo,” he said.
“Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.
“I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but… I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”
I’ve got those things inside of me, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was: again. What he hadn’t said was: It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway.
His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.
“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”
They: the crawlers that were already working their way up his nervous system, heading for his head. There, they would spread their interweaving tendrils. They would take him over, change him, and destroy who he was in the process.
“You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”
And now her gift to him, his reward for standing tall in the face of absolute destruction, for being the one person willing to fight no matter what the odds.
She heard a growing whistle — the sound of an incoming artillery shell. A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.
Perry stared at her. His smile returned, a smile of exhausted disbelief.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Are you nuking me?”
“Yes,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.
The shadow-circle grew larger, engulfing their feet, then spreading until they were both standing in its shade.
A wet laugh joined Perry’s corpse smile. “Dew said I’m like a cockroach, that nothing can kill me. I don’t think physics is on my side this time, though.”
He was dead twice over, yet still he cracked jokes, for her, a last effort to lift some of the blame from her shoulders.
Perry coughed. Little hatchlings shot out of his mouth, fell to the ground. They righted themselves and sprinted away, out of the shadow and into the light.
They wouldn’t escape. Nothing would.
Perry wiped his mouth. His blue eyes bore into her.
“How long do I have?”
“About fifteen seconds,” she said.
Then she started to float away, leaving Perry behind.
He looked up. “No shit? That’s kind of fucked up.”
The bomb’s shadow spread faster, throwing the buildings on either side of the street into deep blackness. Perry stood in the shadow’s center, his blond hair and blue eyes still as bright as if the sun reached down and set them alight.
Margaret floated higher. Perry looked smaller and smaller.
He cupped his hands to his face and shouted: “Margo?”
Shooting up into the sky, she shouted back: “Yes?”
She saw the bomb now — as big as the city itself, a cartoony thing that would crush Detroit by impact alone even if it didn’t detonate.
Perry drew in a huge breath, and screamed his final words.
“Thank you for saving my life!”
The giant bomb exploded. The mushroom cloud rose up far beneath her feet. It wouldn’t reach her. She wouldn’t feel the effects.
She was safe: it was only other people who died.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Margaret Montoya opened her eyes. She’d failed Perry. She’d failed Dew Phillips. She’d failed Amos Braun.
She sat up in bed, trying to remember where she was. A bed, clean sheets that smelled faintly of bleach, heavy blankets… her room aboard the Carl Brashear.
A nap, a short nap that had done nothing to ease her exhaustion.
She wanted to watch the diver go into the Los Angeles, but she could barely move. Maybe it was time to take Tim up on his offer for Adderall. She’d had four hours of sleep in the last twenty — every hour of sleep was a lost hour of analysis and research.
Margaret pushed herself out of bed. She could watch the diver’s efforts while she waited for the initial results from Tim’s yeast modification. Saccharomyces feely. That was the answer, it had to be.
The hydras were a fascinating development, but largely unknown. What effect would they have on a living host? They might wind up being as bad as — or worse than — the crawlers that they killed. Tim had found his living hydras inside pustules on Walker; that was one way the crawlers spread. Would the hydras also puff out, microscopic bits floating on the air until they landed on a new host?
If so, the hydras could become an airborne contagion.
Tim’s yeast, on the other hand, carried no such threat. He’d ramped up the growth rate somehow, making it reproduce two to three times faster than most yeast. It wasn’t contagious — and even if it was, it was just yeast with a piece of the hydra’s coding: no threat of any kind. Still, she had sent Murray a message to look into the Spectrum Health HAC study. If one participant in that study produced hydras, other participants might as well. She couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility that could provide a potential weapon.
Margaret stood. She felt old, she felt creaky. She’d watch the diver, then maybe take one of Tim’s pills.
Tired or not, the work wouldn’t wait.
POSITIVE THOUGHTS
Tim Feely walked down the white corridor, toweling off his hair as he went. Amazing what a shower could do for the soul. His flip-flops flapped against the floor. He wore a thick, white, terrycloth robe, a gift from Captain Yasaka. That poor, poor woman; she commanded an entire ship’s worth of sailors, day in, day out, but sometimes a girl just needed someone else to take charge.
Tim wondered if Margaret Montoya was that kind of woman in the bedroom. Or did her boudoir policies stray into the dictatorial realm? He certainly couldn’t see Clarence Otto as the kind of guy who let his lady boss him around. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Margaret was too aggressive for Tall, Dark & Don’t Threaten My Manhood. If Margo wanted to call the shots, that wouldn’t bother Tim in the least.