Pandemic Read online

  An even greater illustration of God’s perfection and power? He didn’t have to always touch people directly — if he touched a surface, then someone else touched it shortly after, that alone could be enough to spread God’s love.

  Soon, the humans would come for him, try and make him take the cellulose test, but he wouldn’t be where they expected him to be. It was time to wander. Surrounded by a ship full of people who wanted to kill him, he would stay out of sight as best he could. He would avoid attracting attention.

  The longer he went without being caught, the more people he could touch.

  CHEMISTRY

  Before Tim could find out how the hydras survived when the crawlers melted, he had to identify what, exactly, melted those crawlers.

  To solve this puzzle, he had to find the key differences between two human corpses. Both bodies had come from an identical environment: the Los Angeles. Although there were significant variables — one was male, the other female, with additional differences in size and genetic background — for all intents and purposes those two bodies were the same. One had suffered the infection’s final-stage brain modification, the other had not.

  That made Tim’s job theoretically simple: all he had to do was identify something in Candice Walker that was not in Charlie Petrovsky.

  He stood alone in the analysis module, running tests on blood, tissues, organs, even bone. Chemical breakdown, mass spectrometry, DNA analysis, any test he and Margaret could think of for which they had the equipment onboard — and they had a lot of equipment.

  She checked in with him every fifteen to twenty minutes, a hyper Latina with the newfound energy of a chipmunk on meth. She was working with the hydras, trying to figure out what they were. Just another Orbital weapon? Or, possibly, something else.

  Margaret wasn’t the same person who had arrived, what, just a scant fifteen hours earlier? She’d shown up ready to work, certainly, but not like this: now she had a nuclear reactor for a soul that made her tireless, unceasing.

  Tim wanted her more than ever. He’d worshipped Margaret Montoya from afar, mesmerized by the intellect he’d seen reflected in the words and recordings of her Detroit research. The word genius didn’t do her justice.

  His visor display started flashing an icon: the blinking, red exclamation point of an alert. Tim eye-tracked to it, called it up.

  Four hours after he’d begun his comparative analysis between Petrovsky and Walker, the Brashear’s computer had identified a significant discrepancy in mass spectrometry. Walker’s blood showed a massive spike of an unidentified chemical compound that wasn’t present in Petrovsky, not even in trace amounts.

  Whatever it was, she had a ton of it in her system. Was this compound related to the hydras? Was it the reason the hydras lived and the crawlers died? Or was it why Walker didn’t suffer the black rot?

  And why was this mystery chemical so concentrated in her blood?

  Her blood …

  Petrovsky’s tissue …

  “Fuck,” Tim said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  He activated his comms. “Margo, you there?”

  She answered immediately. “Yes, Tim. You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Shittyballs, I’m way more than fine. I need you to find the least-rotted bit of Petrovsky.”

  “Uh, sure,” she said. “You want to tell me why?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  At least he hoped she would.

  THE LOS ANGELES

  The stateroom felt ice cold, but Steve Stanton couldn’t stop sweating.

  He sat at the tiny table, drinking Diet Coke and eating Doritos, hoping his two laptops would give some signal. One hundred and ten million dollars … was that investment sitting dead on the bottom of Lake Michigan?

  Bo Pan spent his time either sleeping or on his cell phone. Steve didn’t know who Bo Pan was talking to, but the conversations revolved around more aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces than one man could possibly have. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Bo Pan was sharing information about Steve’s work, getting details about the activities of the nearby navy ships — Steve and the Platypus had their code; Bo Pan and his handlers obviously had theirs.

  “Steve, it is late,” Bo Pan said. “You told me your machine would contact us an hour ago.” The old man lay in his bunk, spit cup in hand, bushy eyebrows framing black, emotionless eyes.

  “Relax,” Steve said. He tried to sound confident. “It might be staying below because of high levels of navy activity. Sometimes this is more an art than a science.”

  Bo Pan picked his nose. “I see,” he said as he wiped a booger on his jeans. “Then perhaps we should have spent all that money to get you an art degree.”

  The coldness of Bo Pan’s voice made Steve swallow, which drove a flake of Dorito into his throat. Steve tried to wash it back with Diet Coke, but coughed before he could get it down. He managed to turn his head and spray caramel-colored foam onto the wall instead of onto his computers.

  Bo Pan huffed. “Breakfast of champions. I can’t wait to see how you handle your dinner.”

  Steve managed to flip the old man the bird as he brought his coughing under control.

  Bo Pan seemed … different. He’d always acted like a beaten-down laborer, a man who’d spent his life taking shit from everyone. Since the Mary Ellen left the harbor, however, he seemed more self-assured, in control.

  No, no … Steve was just stressing out, imagining things. Bo Pan was Bo Pan. Had to be. It was Steve who had changed. In all his years of work, pursuing whatever development he thought might add to the Platypus’s effectiveness, he’d felt invulnerable. He’d felt brilliant. None of that had been real. This, however, was reality: a boat that never sat still, an old man watching his every move, a machine that refused to respond, and a nation’s investment in him about to go bust.

  He didn’t feel brilliant anymore. He felt incompetent.

  Bo Pan pushed himself up on one arm.

  “Steve, it seems you are telling me you don’t know where your creation is, but I know you cannot be telling me that.”

  A coldness in that voice, and steel. No sorry, sorry this time. Steve shivered.

  “The sensor algorithms determine where the Platypus goes, so it isn’t necessarily moving in a straight line,” he said. “If it has to go around or through anything, that causes delays, and if it sees any American UUVs or divers, it knows to swim away and come back later. Could be any minute now. Or it could be hours. The UUV is programmed to not be seen, Bo Pan. I can’t—”

  A laptop let out a beep. Bo Pan sat up straighter. Steve put the chips aside, brushed his orange-dust-covered fingertips against his shirt, then pulled the laptop closer.

  A tweet.

  @TheMadPlatypus: Dizzy in the hizzy.

  Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a crashing waterfall of relief.

  “It’s the Platypus,” he said. “It’s signaling.”

  He watched a string of tweets come pouring in. Seemingly normal language — mostly about “hot bitches” and “keg stands” — told him the story.

  Bo Pan leaned in. “Is it working?”

  Steve smiled. “Hell yeah, it is.” The Platypus had found the location. Steve read the tweets, trying to figure out what had taken so long. There it was:

  @TheMadPlatypus: Mean muggin’ AT-ATs all over the damn place. Fuck the Empire.

  Navy ROVs.

  Holy shit, it was really happening.

  @TheMadPlatypus: Stick in the mud is big like a pickle.

  It wasn’t just the ROVs … the Platypus had found a big object on the bottom. Too big.

  “Something is off,” he said. “When the alien object came down, there was enough observed data to calculate its size as roughly equivalent to a small refrigerator, like the kind I had in my dorm. But the Platypus found something exponentially larger.”

  Bo Pan nodded slowly. His eyes seemed electric.

&nbs
p; “Do you have pictures?”

  Steve huffed. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  The old man’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Yes, I have pictures.”

  “Show me,” Bo Pan said. “And prepare yourself. There is some other information I have not told you.”

  Steve sighed. The old man was being cryptic. Whatever.

  That feeling of failure faded away. Steve had done it — he felt strong once again, ready for the next step.

  The Platypus couldn’t send straight video. That was too much bandwidth; even if his encryption held, the size of that signal and the location it came from could alert the navy ships to the Platypus’s presence. Instead, his machine took low-bandwidth snapshots — one frame every twenty seconds — and routed each one through a different secure server.

  “Here we are,” Steve said, and called them up on the screen.

  The first picture showed something green, blurry. That meant it was a pale color, brightly reflecting the low-light camera’s illumination.

  “Can’t make that out,” Steve said. “Lemme get the next one.”

  He called the image up, and froze: the face and torso of a corpse.

  A sailor. A navy sailor.

  Puffy face. Black sockets where the eyes had once been, eyes probably eaten by fish that had also picked at the skin, tearing holes and leaving strands of flesh dangling weightless in the water. Body bloated, so swollen it had burst the zipper at the belly and neck, leaving only a bit near the collar still fastened. Pale skin glowed an obscene white-green.

  “Bo Pan, what is this?”

  “More pictures. Let me see.”

  The next image showed a long shape. Gray, perhaps? The one after that, yes, gray, large, maybe ten feet tall or even taller, rising up at an angle. Definitely artificial.

  When Steve saw the next picture, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. He realized, finally, just how dangerous this game was.

  The gray image rose up at an angle. Flat, with slightly curved sides. At the top, a white, three-digit number glowed a bright green.

  The number: 688.

  “A submarine sail,” Steve said. “Is that … is that a nuclear sub?”

  Bo Pan leaned in closer, so close Steve could smell his unwashed odor. The old man seemed … gleeful.

  “The Los Angeles,” Bo Pan said. “There was a battle. It sank.”

  Steve hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to understand the situation; when Bo Pan said the word location, Steve had jumped. How naive. How stupid.

  The next picture came up. The Platypus was moving closer to the sub. Another corpse. Some kind of bulbous, sausage-shaped metal construct behind the sail, bent and torn, a man-size round door still sealed but the construct itself ripped open. And there, stuck on that jagged metal, a leg — just a leg, no body. Inside the ruined construct, Steve saw an inner hatch sitting open.

  This was almost a thousand feet below the surface. Could there be survivors?

  “A battle,” Steve said, his voice a husky whisper. “Between who?”

  “The Americans. They shot at each other.”

  Steve couldn’t think. Why hadn’t he asked more questions?

  The final picture showed blackness: the Platypus moving over the submarine to the other side. Then, a wider shot of the sunken ship; from this angle, it looked bent, like a loaf of French bread kinked in the middle. A huge gash marred the hull, metal shards bent violently inward.

  Bo Pan pointed to the gash.

  “There,” he said. “Can your machine go inside?”

  Steve stared. What had happened? Why had the navy destroyed its own vessel? If the navy would slaughter everyone on the Los Angeles, it wouldn’t think twice about sinking the Mary Ellen Moffett. He started to shake. He was in danger. This little excursion might get him killed.

  “Steve,” Bo Pan said sharply. “Can it go in inside?”

  Steve tried to clear his thoughts, tried to focus. He examined the tear in the hull.

  “No, that’s probably not a good spot,” he said. “The metal is too torn up, too jagged. The Platypus could get hooked on a shard, get stuck.”

  “Then go back to the picture of the dry deck shelter.”

  Steve started to ask what that was, but then he knew — the sausage-shaped construct behind the sail. He called up that image.

  “There,” Bo Pan said. “Could it go in there?”

  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.