Chimera, p.14
Chimera, page 14
“What aren’t you telling us, sergeant?”
Cameron shakes his head. He’s just about to order his men to continue evaluating the archived security footage from NeXgen’s database when a new video box opens on the tablet. A man with white hair and an aquiline nose stares back at them through tinted glasses, a self-impressed smirk on his face. Dr. Trey Waller. The former DARPA scientist cocks his head and speaks in a voice even sharper than his features.
“Senior Staff Sergeant Cameron,” he says. “Perhaps the two of us should have a little chat.”
“Agreed,” Cameron says. “It’s about time my team and I got some answers.”
Waller vanishes with a nod.
Cameron passes the tablet back to Rush.
“They terminated my connection to the NeXgen mainframe,” the tech sergeant says. “I’ve only managed to download maybe three hours of footage.”
“Do you think you can clean up that imagery so we can get a better look at what we’re dealing with?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get on it,” Cameron says, turning to Ryder. “Keep going through those security recordings and find me something we can use. Do you get my meaning?”
Ryder nods his understanding. Waller had just defined the terms of their relationship. He’d staked his claim to the high ground, which meant that Cameron and his men needed to find leverage they could use to level the playing field. They weren’t about to walk into a potentially hostile situation without getting the answers they needed first.
Cameron ducks out of the hell hole, rises to his full height, and cracks his neck, first one way and then the other. Speedy and Bashir glance up at him as he strides past their seats. Ronny lounges with his feet up and his eyes closed, but his posture suggests that the three civilians emerging from the SUSV haven’t escaped his attention. They clear a path for Cameron to climb into the vehicle with Waller and close the door behind him. He takes a seat across from the man who believes himself to be in charge and looks him squarely in the eyes.
“I have to admit I’m impressed that your man was able to hack into our system,” Waller says, “but our cybersecurity team is the best that money can buy.”
“As I’m sure are you, judging by the fortune you’ve squirreled away in offshore accounts,” Cameron says.
Waller smiles in amusement.
“Despite what you think, we’re all on the same side here.”
“And which side is that?”
“The side that wants to see the staff of Academy Station returned safely to their families.”
“Those who are still alive anyway,” Cameron says. He’s dealt with men like Waller before, men with all sorts of fancy degrees who think they’re so much cleverer than everyone around them. Their vanity always proves to be their Achilles’ heel. “I know I’m not nearly as smart or as well educated as you are, but—”
“Let’s not waste what little time remains playing games,” Waller says. “I know which daily logs you’ve viewed, and I’ve seen the security footage your tech sergeant downloaded. I think you have a pretty good idea what our scientists discovered at that station.”
“A biofilm that appears to produce a cloaking effect.”
“Excellent,” Waller says, stroking his chin. Cameron wishes he could see the man’s eyes so he could better read his intentions. “I had requested that your colonel dispatch his top men; I’m pleased he didn’t disappoint.”
“Appealing to my ego will get you nowhere.”
“Nor will playing upon my vanity.”
“Then what do you say we cut to the chase,” Cameron says. “Tell me what the hell my men and I are walking into, or you’ll be going in there alone.”
Waller smiles and opens the laptop resting on the seat beside him. He turns the screen so that Cameron can see the video log. Dr. Rantanen wears a pair of rubber gloves and holds a scalpel in one hand and a pair of forceps in the other. A green lighting fixture illuminates the cocoon-like mass of biological matter on the dissecting tray in front of her. It takes several seconds for Cameron to realize that it’s a fish, which, judging by the T-shaped pins affixing its fins to the tray, is no longer among the living.
“We’re now at approximately thirty hours post-introduction of the sculpin,” she says. “As you can clearly see, the production of dragline silk has run rampant, encasing the entire fish within an asymmetrical, chrysalis-like construct.”
Dr. Rantanen cuts a straight line with the scalpel down the fish’s head, from the base of its dorsal spines to its bulbous lips. She pinches a gob of webbing with the forceps and peels the layer of scales covering half of its face outward, past its cloudy eye. A skein of blood rises from the pinkish tissue. She sets down the scalpel and uses an eyedropper to irrigate the wound. The blood clears and reveals tiny hairlike filaments connecting the scales to the flesh. She pulls on the scales and the filaments stretch until they snap.
Cameron glances at Waller from the corner of his eye and finds the other man watching him, gauging his reaction. He concentrates on maintaining a neutral expression so as not to betray the fact that he recognizes that the spider silk has worked its way through the scales and knitted itself into the underlying tissue.
“While I have yet to establish whether this physical intrusion is structural or functional,” Dr. Rantanen continues, “I have no doubt that the relationship between the chimeras and the sculpin is not mutualistic as we’d hoped, but rather parasitic in nature, although I have yet to establish what the chimera gains from this interaction as it’s already self-sustaining. Perhaps it merely adheres to the fish and uses it as a means of locomotion, much like an anemone that grows on a snail’s shell or a barnacle that clings to a whale, or maybe . . . ”
Her words trail off and she leans back in her seat, her brows lowered in concentration. She grabs her parka from where it hangs on the back of her chair, bunches it in her lap, and looks around her desk until her eyes settle on something off-screen. With a faint smile, she grabs a thin Plexiglas stirring rod and stares down at it for several seconds, momentarily lost in thought.
“Surely you’ve seen how a spider web billows toward you when you get too close,” she says, looking up into the camera once more. “That’s because the glue-like substance coating the silk has electrostatic properties that cause it to reach out and grab charged particles or objects, like pollen and flying insects. It also functions like a water magnet, sucking in humidity and converting it into tiny droplets that increase the electrical conductivity of the silk.”
Dr. Rantanen bunches up the hood of her parka and rubs the stirring rod back and forth through the fur lining, building up a static charge. She aligns it with the filaments passing through the intact scales on the opposite side of the fish’s skull and carefully touches them—
The fish flops on the tray, tearing its fins free from the pins holding them in place.
Cameron looks at Waller and then back at the monitor, his mind reeling with the implications.
27
Academy Station
Greenland
81.906296, -29.744960
One Week Ago
Mira stood as close to the edge of the glacier as she dared. From this vantage point, she looked directly down upon a sloping boulder field that vanished into the shallows of the artificial lake. Runoff flowed between the massive stones, eroding the earth and causing the water level to continuously rise and creep up the face of the dam, little more than a gray crescent against the black ribbon of the distant fjord. The sun barely breached the horizon, its diminishing rays reflecting from the silver saucer of Academy Station and glimmering from the choppy waves. The bloodred stain of the archaeal bloom had nearly dissipated, leaving faint pink shapes in the lees of the islands, where the biofilm was undergoing its chimeric transformation before her very eyes.
Her hands trembled as she turned away from the lake and headed back toward the snowmobiles.
“We need to get moving,” Leo said. The exposed skin around his goggles was already windburned. Ice clung to his balaclava where his breath passed through the neoprene. “The sun might have just risen, but we only have an hour and a half before it sets again. And, believe me, once it does, the temperature will start falling in a hurry.”
Mira nodded her understanding. She probably shouldn’t have asked to stop, but she’d needed to see the lake from this perspective to truly understand the consequences her actions had wrought. No seabirds swooped low across the ice or bedded down on the shore. Not a single fish rippled the surface. Only the tracks of a lone polar bear wended downhill into the water, the massive pawprints preserved in the frozen mud. It was almost as though the animals could all sense what had happened and wanted nothing to do with whatever biological processes were transpiring in the depths.
She climbed onto the slick black Arctic Cat Bearcat and started the engine. While she’d never actually driven one before, the controls weren’t all that much different than the dirt bikes she’d ridden as a teenager, and she picked them up quickly. Carrie and Leo often pulled away from her, trailing rooster tails that merged with the blowing snow. She kept their bright orange parkas in sight, or at least as well as she could. The occasional gale kicked up with such ferocity that they disappeared when they were barely ten feet away, forcing her to throttle down so she wouldn’t slam into them from behind while going twenty miles an hour across a sheet of glazed ice.
It would have been exceedingly easy to lose her bearings out here. There were no mountains or trees or landmarks of any kind, only snow as far as the eye could see. She tried not to imagine the horror of being lost out here a week from now, when the sun no longer rose and temperatures rarely climbed out of the negatives. If she somehow managed to get turned around, she could very well freeze to death before she found her way back to the station, mere miles away.
Instead, she focused on the memory of the live feed that Carrie had broadcast from inside the cave. Mira had so many questions for which there were simply no answers, chief among them what in the name of God was frozen in the ice and why had she only been able to see its shadow? She had a pretty good idea what caused the latter, but the answer to the former terrified her. A part of her wished Sammie could have torn herself away from her microscope, if only long enough to come with them. At the same time, however, she knew that her partner’s time was better spent in the pursuit of answers, especially if this little expedition revealed what she expected.
The intonation of Leo’s snowmobile changed as he slowed, materializing from his own wake and driving into the shadow of a rocky crest, on top of which a tattered red flag snapped on the wind. Attached to its base was the geolocation beacon that Moore and his team had used to mark the spot where they’d remotely sensed the subterranean void.
Carrie pulled into the windbreak, turned off her Arctic Cat, and removed her helmet.
“We have to go on foot from here,” she shouted.
Mira silenced her engine. The wind screamed in its stead, blowing a fin of snow into the air from the edge of a cliff maybe fifty feet ahead of them.
“We cut a path down through the ravine,” Leo said. “It’s steep and slick in places. Just take it slow and you’ll be fine.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Mira said, following him toward what looked like the edge of the world, beyond which she could see only storm clouds, darkening as the premature dusk crept inland from the east.
The path zig-zagged between ice formations that Mira didn’t realize were actually made of stone until she descended from the wind and snow onto the bare granite and hardpacked dirt. Loose talus, slicker even than the ice, slid out from beneath her with every step, clattering down the steep hillside and plummeting to the bottom of the ravine. The stream at the bottom flowed beneath the ice, its crystalline waters appearing every so often as they wended across nearly a hundred miles of rugged terrain toward Danmark Fjord, on the far side of which stood Station Nord, a Danish defense command post staffed by a handful of non-commissioned officers and a few seasonal researchers.
Mira followed Carrie and Leo from the makeshift trail onto a narrow ledge, where they were forced to scoot sideways. The mouth of the cave yawned before them, maybe five feet wide and two feet tall, like a crooked smile slashing the face of a frozen waterfall. Leo lowered himself to his chest and slithered into the darkness. His flashlight blossomed a heartbeat later, limning the interior with an ethereal blue glow.
Mira waited for Carrie to squirm through the orifice before squeezing in behind her. The pressure on her back and chest made her feel like she was suffocating. On the verge of panic, she dragged herself through to the other side and stood up the moment she was finally able to do so. She removed the trio of mini LED flashlights she’d brought with her from her parka, read the labels, and stuffed the green and black lights back into the inner pocket. A flick of a switch and she shone the white light upon walls made entirely of ice, which had grown so thick that it looked like blue glass with wavy striations corresponding to the different eons that had come and gone since the Earth was new.
“Back here,” Leo said. His voice sounded like it simultaneously originated from far away and all around her at once. “You should really check it out before I start drilling.”
Mira followed the sound of his voice deeper into the cave, alternately shining her light onto the rocky ground to keep from rolling an ankle and exploring the amazing world around her. The differences in the thickness and appearance of the ice as she advanced into the darkness were staggering. At first, the walls and the ceiling looked like they were made of chipped glass, and then waves somehow suspended all around her. Finally, they took on a warped texture as soft and smooth as limestone. She ran her palms along the ice as she walked, the cold passing straight through her gloves as though she weren’t wearing them at all. The rock underneath was still visible, like the bed of a clear creek, only distorted to such an extent that it was impossible to tell how many feet of ice had frozen over it.
She found Leo around a blind corner that reminded her of a turn in a funhouse maze. His light and the orange of his coat reflected from seemingly everywhere around her at once as he knelt over his handheld drill. The coring auger was only three inches wide and three feet long, but it was portable and would serve his purposes until he determined if it was worth the effort to haul the larger electromechanical drill from the station.
“Where is . . . ?” Mira started to ask, but the moment her light struck the wall to her right, the answer became clear.
The beam illuminated a hazy shape that looked almost like a collection of fluid trapped within the ice, which cast a curiously deep shadow onto the bedrock behind it. This was what she’d seen on the video. This inexplicable shadow was the reason she’d braved the storm and the falling temperatures and traveled all the way across the glacier with little more than a trio of flashlights stuffed into the inner pockets of her parka.
“Would you guys mind shutting off your lights for a second?” she asked, exchanging her ordinary flashlight for the green one.
Mira hit the switch and pressed the lens right up against the ice. She couldn’t even tell if the 540-nanometer wavelength was strong enough to penetrate more than a few inches until the others turned off their white lights. The shape took form, seemingly out of nowhere, along with a dozen others she hadn’t seen until that very moment, scattered throughout the ice all around her, glimmering iridescent creatures unlike any she’d ever seen before. They resembled trilobites. Only rather than ridged carapaces reminiscent of horseshoe crabs, they had eleven broad, leglike protrusions extending from either side of their slender bodies and long stingers jutting from their rear ends.
“What in the world are those things?” Carrie asked.
“I have no idea,” Mira said. “Can one of you take some pictures for me?”
Mira waited until she no longer heard the clicking of Leo’s camera before trading her green light for the black, which caused all of the tiny bacteria covering the creatures to glow faintly purple, like magic dust coalescing into vague constellations.
She could only stare at these prehistoric creatures, which must have been hundreds of millions—if not billions—of years old to have existed at the same time as the Ymirarchaea. It felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Granted, nothing remotely resembling this species currently existed, but the mere fact that it had interacted with the naturally occurring form of the chimera without utterly derailing the course of global events meant that the accidental release of their own genetically engineered version might not destroy the local environment after all.
Of course, she couldn’t account for the spiridion genes that had been inserted into the bacterium’s genome, but how much harm could the addition of spider DNA to a microscopic communal organism really do?
28
Mira had been so excited to share the news of her discovery that she’d tried hailing Sammie on the transceiver at least ten times, but her partner hadn’t answered. She’d assumed that Sammie’s exhaustion had finally caught up with her and the microbiologist had passed out in her bed. Instead, she found Sammie sitting on the floor of the lab, staring into the aquarium, looking significantly more worn down than she had mere hours ago. Her eyes were dark and recessed, her face a pasty shade of white. She appeared haunted, as though something was consuming her from the inside out.
“Let’s get you up,” Mira said, taking Sammie by the hands and pulling her to her feet.
Sammie blinked several times, as though seeing her for the first time. The microbiologist’s eyes were so bloodshot that her irises looked like sapphires sinking into pools of lava and her lips had taken on a bluish cast. She was in desperate need of a shower, but at least she was still eating, if the small of hardboiled eggs on her breath were any indication.
“There’s something I need to show you,” Sammie said.
