Candice Walker, on the other hand, still showed no sign of the infection’s rapid decomposition.
Margaret eye-tracked through her HUD menus. She directed a microscope to lock onto one of the hydras in Edmund’s blood sample. Its waving tendrils reached out, blindly feeling for something to grab, to pull itself forward.
Walker’s stem cell therapy had introduced something new, something the Orbital hadn’t encountered before. Her infection had modified some of her normal stem cells, which probably produced the crawlers Margaret had seen so many times before. But some of the hacked stem cells must have had that artificial chromosome — was that what produced the hydras? A variant so different that it didn’t recognize the original crawlers as “self”?
The new hydra strain reproduced at a phenomenal rate, but so far didn’t seem to damage the host in any way. Walker had only had the hydras for three or four days, at most — there was no telling what might have happened had they continued to grow inside of her.
So many unknowns, but there was one fact that Margaret couldn’t deny: the hydras secreted a catalyst that killed off earlier strains of the infection — strains that damaged the human host, even killed it.
“You’re protecting your environment,” she said to the microscopic image on the HUD, as if it could hear her, as if it could think about her words. “Walker was your world… when she died, most of your kind died as well. You’re something new. You aren’t a means to the Orbital’s ends at all, are you?”
The hydra didn’t answer. It kept reaching, kept pulling.
Margaret felt her stomach churning. One too many of Tim’s Adderalls? The excitement at discovering a new form of life? Or was it that the hydras’ potential went way beyond Tim’s yeast? Walker’s pustules had contained hydras, hydras that might become an airborne contagion spreading from person to person, all across the globe, promising permanent immunity to the Orbital’s infection.
A different kind of pandemic.
Margaret shook her head. Too risky. Too many unknowns for something that had been created, after all, by the Orbital’s alien technology.
An alert popped up in her HUD: Tim Feely was calling her. She eye-tracked to the icon and connected. His face appeared in a small window in the upper-left corner of her visor.
“Margaret, I’m finished processing the samples taken from the three new victims. Can you join me in the analysis module? I think you better take a look.”
“On my way,” she said.
Tim’s face blinked out.
So little time…
SQUARE-JAWED MAN
Tim knew that if he made it out of this alive, he was changing careers. Janitor, maybe. At a grade school. Mopping floors, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning up puke — he’d be the happiest employee around.
Two doctorates. A lifetime of advanced learning. His work on Black Manitou had been a part of one of the most revolutionary projects in human history, and now here he was neck-deep in another. And where did all that put him? Right in the crosshairs of disaster.
“Tim? Hello?”
His head snapped right, toward Margaret. Clarence was with her; he’d suited up for once, decided to join the party.
Margaret smiled at him. “Tim, you okay?”
He wasn’t. He never would be again.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He wanted to rub the crust from his eyes, but the goddamn suit meant he couldn’t touch them.
“Looks like our three new hosts give us a mixed bag of infections,” he said. “Brain biopsy shows crawler material in Nagy. He’s already converted, obviously. The samples from Chappas show signs of those dandelion seeds you documented in Detroit, so it looks like he’s on his way to becoming a puffball.”
Margaret nodded slowly. “All right. And what about Austin?”
Conroy Austin, the boy who had cried right up until he’d been gassed.
“His body is changing on a scale unlike anything you documented before,” Tim said. “Your earlier research showed the infection seems to concentrate on specific areas of the host’s body, so the altered stem cells are packed in tight. Like a supply chain — the closer the factories are together, the faster and easier it is to combine the parts, right?”
Margaret nodded.
Tim called up an image and shared it with both Margaret’s and Clarence’s headsets.
“The infection is hitting Austin everywhere, and all at once. The poor bastard. It isn’t just rewriting his stem cells… it’s rewriting him.”
“To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the Los Angeles’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”
Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.
“We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”
“Don’t look at the cocoon,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”
Clarence leaned in. “The what?”
“His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But… something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.
Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy shit. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re massive — they look too damn big for his head. And the masseter… it’s at least four times normal size.”
The man’s entire skull looked distorted, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.
Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”
“Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly bigger if he’s not ingesting massive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”
“He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does… he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.
Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was absorbing the other?
“Fuck this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”
Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently, did want to know.
“Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffballs are for mass infection. What role would could this new thing play?”
Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”
Margaret sneered. “Then guess, goddamit. You’re the soldier, remember?”
Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word soldier it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.
Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said you got me there.
“Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the hell out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they can’t build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”