But Clarence didn’t want a medal… he wanted Margaret.
Onboard the Carl Brashear, the woman he’d fallen in love with had returned. She’d been decisive, insightful, tireless and brilliant. She’d been her old self, her fighting self.
And now? Now she wouldn’t see him.
All day long she’d stayed locked up in her mission module. He’d tried to get in to talk to her, but through the closed door she’d told him to go away. She sounded scared. She sounded alone.
For the last five years, whenever she’d felt those emotions she had come to him. He had comforted her, or at least he’d tried. She was his wife. His job was to protect her, help her through any problem no matter how great. At the end of the day, no matter how he sliced it, that was a mission he’d failed.
The sun finally ducked below the water, leaving only the residual glow of pink clouds to reflect against Lake Michigan’s tall waves.
Maybe tomorrow he could talk to her. Maybe he could make it all up to her.
If he worked hard enough at it, if he apologized enough, then maybe… maybe… they could repair the damage they had done to each other.
Maybe they could be together again.
DAY SEVEN
ACTUALIZATION
Clarence Otto had to die.
They all had to die.
All of them… all the humans.
Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so obvious. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.
She got it now. She understood. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do…
…to do…
…to do God’s work.
Not the God she had thought she’d known in the naiveté of childhood, or any of the thousands of randomly invented supernatural beings that caused people to slaughter each other throughout history. No, a real god. A god with the power to send ships across space. The power to change human beings into something else, something new.
Something powerful.
Humanity had shit all over this planet.
It was time to remove humanity, time to let the world start over.
Margaret hated them. She wanted to walk out of her little cabin and stab the first person she saw. Maybe find a wrench, bash them in the head again and again until bone cracked, until she saw the bloody mess that was their brains.
She wanted to kill Clarence.
She wanted to kill Tim.
She wanted to kill the sailors, the SEALs, sink this fucking ship and put them all on the bottom so they would never hurt anyone ever again.
Margaret stood. The thought of taking life thrilled her, infused her with excitement, made her vibrate and bubble with pure energy.
Who would be first?
She reached for the door handle, then stopped.
They outnumbered her. If she killed one of them, maybe even two or three, the rest would certainly get her. She couldn’t let that happen, because she was meant for something greater.
Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.
An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted leaders.
Leaders who could pass undetected among the humans. Leaders who could infiltrate human organizations. Leaders who could gather the troops of God together, make them operate as an organized unit.
Margaret could do all of those things. She had been chosen for it.
How ironic that Clarence turned out to be right after alclass="underline" Margaret Montoya wasn’t a soldier — she was a general.
All she had to do was bide her time and wait for her army.
She wasn’t contagious. Her infection gave her that knowledge. No tongue triangles, no blisters with dandelion seeds, nothing that could reveal her true nature. That made perfect sense: if she showed those telltale symptoms, the humans would kill her. Not being contagious was actually a form of camouflage.
For now, while trapped on this ship, she had to blend in. She couldn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She had to wait. She had to be… calm. Like Cantrell had been back on the Brashear. Not at first, no; he’d been jittery, paranoid. He must have been very close to finally realizing his role, just as Margaret now realized hers.
The Orbital must have engineered new crawlers that could penetrate BSL-4 suits. That was the only logical answer. It wouldn’t take much, just a microscopic hole, barely detectable if it was even detectable at all. Was that how Clark and Cantrell had become infected? Yes, that made sense, and when they were submerged in bleach, maybe the pressure change caused a tiny bit to leak through… that explained why they both reported smelling it.
But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?
Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day… at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.
What a difference a day makes.
Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how arrogant, to think she could outsmart such a power.
But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.
Margaret reached for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.
If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.
Then the carnage would begin.
STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.
On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.
“Doctor Feely, the latest results of your data-mining algorithm are coming in,” Kimber said. She had big, dark eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.
“Kimber, I have to wonder about your life choices.”
She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean with a face like that, why aren’t you in Hollywood making movies?”
She shook her head, but also blushed a little. “Doctor Feely, can we just go over the results?”