Chimera, p.29
Chimera, page 29
She allows Aaron to help her to her feet, but she can’t bring herself to meet his gaze. All she can do is stare blankly out across the canyon as she follows him uphill toward a vehicle that resembles twin armored boxcars with snowmobile treads. Two more soldiers emerge from the front car—Rush and Rodriguez—and help lay Ryder on the back row of seats in the rear car, leaving the man who carried him all this way to collapse in the snow, his pain etched upon his face.
“What the hell happened down there?” Rush shouts. He produces an emergency medical kit from underneath the seat and sets to work bandaging the gaping wound on Ryder’s face. “It felt like the whole damn mountain dropped underneath us. Had Speedy not reacted as quickly as he did and gotten us the hell out of there, we’d have probably landed right on your heads.”
Cameron shakes his head as though unable to find the words to reply. Mira follows his sightline to where the tattered flag marking the cave’s location now flies. Its bent post protrudes at an angle from the mouth of a pit that has to be fifty feet deep. Slabs of stone stand at odd angles from the edges, mirroring the shape of the collapsed cavern. Snow already accumulates on rocks that haven’t been exposed to the outside air in hundreds of millions of years, while the wind hurls flakes down through the dark crevices between them, into the heart of the earth itself. She thinks about the bodies of her friends entombed down there and promises herself that she’ll return to collect their remains, even if it means crawling down through those narrow gaps and dragging them out all by herself.
“Are they all that’s left?” the man Rush had called Speedy asks, nodding in her direction. He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Were you able to neutralize the threat?”
Cameron rises from the snow and climbs into the passenger seat of the front car without answering.
“We need to get to the station before Waller can unload the biofilm,” he says.
Speedy nods and hurriedly climbs behind the wheel.
“Why don’t you two come with me,” a voice says from behind Mira. Rush offers a reassuring smile and guides Aaron and her into the rear car. He gestures for them to sit in the seats across from Ryder. “Let’s see what we can do about those lacerations.”
Mira dabs her fingertips into the freezing blood on her forehead. She’d nearly forgotten about the injury. The reminder brings on a fresh swell of pain, dispelling the numbness that had settled over her. She wants nothing more than to curl into a ball and wish the whole world away.
The engine growls, and the vehicle lumbers across the glacier. Mira watches the rubble fade behind her through the ice-etched window while the soldier swabs her laceration with a topical antiseptic. She wants to thank him and ask how he managed to find them, but no words will form. Coldness spreads outward from her core, and her vision goes out of focus. The blowing snow shifts directions, and, for the most fleeting of moments, she could swear she sees a spectral green figure. She only vaguely understands that she’s going into shock.
Rush closes her wound with a handful of butterfly bandages and sets to work on Aaron, who stares at the injured man lying on the bench seat across from him through glazed eyes. Ryder’s pasty white from blood loss, and his chest barely rises with his labored inhalations. If he dies, his death will be Mira’s fault as well. A man she’s never met, but one who traveled thousands of miles to rescue her, only to find hell waiting for him in a dark ice cave—
“They’re tearing down the barricade,” Rush says. He abruptly grabs the tablet propped on the seat beside him and swings the microphone attached to his helmet in front of his lips. Mira catches a glimpse of the screen. She hardly recognizes the main entrance of Academy Station. Desks and bed frames have been haphazardly piled against the front door. Two men she’s never seen before are attacking the mound with their bare hands, hurling aside the debris. “How far out are we?”
The response through his earpiece is loud enough that Mira can hear it, even over the rumble of the tread.
“What’s going on?” a voice responds.
“Waller’s making his move,” Rush responds. “And he appears to be in a hurry.”
Mira recognizes the name from the long line of signatures at the bottom of the form approving her request to use the purple marine bacterium for her study. What in the world is a bigwig from NeXgen doing all the way—?
And then it hits her.
She recalls watching Sammie’s final video log. Her partner had described the presence of hydrolytic enzymes in the dead sculpin’s wounds and signed off with the words “I await advisement.” This must be the man she’d been addressing, a man who’d dropped everything and traveled to the arctic when he recognized the significance, a man who’d barricaded himself inside the station while everyone else searched for survivors. He’d realized what the chimeras were capable of doing.
“He’s come to collect the biofilm,” she whispers.
The vehicle accelerates, churning up clouds of snow. The world passes in a white blur as Mira contemplates the ramifications. If her chimeras were to fall into the wrong hands, they could very well be responsible for the extinction of every higher order of life on the planet. She feels sick to her stomach. Had she ever been in control of her own project?
They needed to destroy the chimeras, along with every last bit of her research, and scour this entire area from the face of the planet.
Lake Tranquility streaks through her peripheral vision, its frozen islands standing like gravity-defying icicles from the vast field of snow. Academy Station winks through the storm, reflecting the green of the northern lights, which have begun to fade to a diffuse purple haze. The tank treads bound over imperfections in the ice, launching from buried features that haven’t seen the light of day since the dawn of time. Aaron scoots higher in his seat at the sight of the approaching station, his feet uselessly scraping the floor in an effort to create as much distance as possible between him and the facility.
In the distance, two figures lower their heads against the wind and stagger away from the open front door. They disappear behind the rows of solar panels, only to reappear near the top of the staircase leading down to the lake.
The vehicle slews on the ice and grinds to a halt. It has barely come to rest when the men in the front car jump out and give pursuit.
“Stay here,” Rush says. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
He reaches for the rear door, but Mira grabs him by the sleeve before he can throw the latch.
“There’s still a polar bear out there,” she says.
“Not anymore.”
Rush extricates his arm from her grasp, throws open the door, and hopes down into the snow. The wounded soldier groans and tries to sit up, the movement causing him to open his eyes and bare his teeth in agony. His bandages darken with blood, ribbons of which dribble down his neck from behind his ear, iridescing in the waning green glow.
Mira gasps and climbs out before Rush can close the door. She pulls him aside and speaks just loud enough that he can hear her over the wailing wind.
“Your friend’s infected. I saw—”
The words die on her lips as something catches her eye, right at the edge of the vehicle’s roofline.
A pale red smear.
Blood.
52
Cameron runs through the snow toward the edge of the cliff, where the clanging sounds of heavy boots striking the metal steps reverberate from the canyon. He shields his eyes against the ice crystals blowing inland from the fjord and sees the men from NeXgen, who’re nearly all the way to the bottom and descending at a measured pace. Neither of them glances up the switchbacking stairs to make sure they aren’t being followed, allowing Cameron to close the gap behind them at a rapid click.
He glances back at Speedy as he rounds the second landing, planting his feet near the edges to minimize the clamor of his footsteps. The vehicle operations specialist recognizes what he’s doing and follows suit. As long as the men they’re chasing continue making more noise, they won’t notice—
The racket abruptly ceases.
Cameron crouches against the railing and signals for Speedy to do the same. The clanging echoes away into oblivion, swept away by the rising wind.
“Chief,” Rush says through his earpiece. The tone of his voice makes Cameron’s blood run cold. “There’s something up here you need to see.”
Cameron doesn’t respond for fear of betraying his presence to the men below. Besides, he has complete confidence in his tech sergeant’s ability to handle anything that comes his way.
He risks a peek over the side and watches two figures streak out from underneath him onto the slick talus. One of the men slips and falls. The other doesn’t even slow down.
“Where are they going?” Speedy whispers.
Cameron shakes his head. He was wondering the same thing. He’d been certain that Waller had arranged for the arrival of an overland vehicle or a second plane, but he and Kato were heading in the opposite direction from the landing strip and moving with the purpose of men who knew their destination. Where could they possibly be going?
Colonel Patrick’s words from Cameron’s initial briefing rise unbidden.
We’re talking about Peary Land in Greenland, the northernmost landmass on the planet. The temperature’s currently thirty below and Nord is reporting whiteout conditions. There’s no way they’re reaching it across a hundred miles of open arctic terrain.
Cameron tunes him out and concentrates on the memory of that conversation. Why was his mind dredging it up now?
This will be a search and rescue mission, Lieutenant Colonel Andrews had said. We’ve been in contact with a Canadian Coast Guard cutter on Baffin Bay and several commercial vessels in the Greenland and Norwegian Seas, but they lack your team’s medical training and experience under these conditions.
And then it hits him. It wasn’t something that either of his commanding officers had said, but rather the words spoken by Dr. Carter Young, the representative from NeXgen.
One of our subsidiaries operates a shipping fleet out of Norway. We could dispatch a SAR team, but even if they set sail right now, you’d still beat them by a good eight hours.
But if that vessel had been put to sea when the NSF first received Dr. Stone’s call for help . . .
Waller hurries along the treacherous trail toward the distant observation center, which flirts in and out of the storm.
“We can’t let them reach the dam,” Cameron says.
He pushes off from the rail and jumps down to the next landing, abandoning all attempts at stealth.
“What’s going on?” Speedy asks, but before Cameron can answer, the conning tower of an icebreaker materializes from the mist shrouding the fjord.
Mira walks around the side of the vehicle to get a better look at the smeared blood. It almost looks like a palmprint. Below it, there’s another smudge that resembles the ball of a foot, with teardrop-shaped impressions where the toes would have been.
“Chief,” Rush says from behind her, speaking into his microphone. “I think we might have a serious problem up here. Acknowledge, over.”
Only static crackles from his earpiece in response.
The world seems to tilt on an unseen axis as Mira climbs up onto the running board and stares at the roof of the rear car. There’s blood everywhere. She recognizes a vaguely human shape, like a crimson snow angel, and recalls the shadowed gaps between the fallen stones at the site of the cave-in, the very same openings through which she’d promised herself she would crawl to recover her friends’ bodies, if she had no other choice. Is it possible that Sammie had somehow survived and used them to reach the surface?
Rush says something from behind her, but she can’t make out his words over the whooshing of her pulse in her ears.
She climbs down and walks around the tailgate to the opposite side of the vehicle, where there are still dimples in the snow from footprints that the wind hasn’t entirely erased. Faint pink droplets mar the snow between them, leading toward the station.
No, not toward the station.
Around it.
Mira leans into the wind and follows the rapidly disappearing trail as though in a trance. Her eyes guide her as her mind transports her into memory. She sees herself reaching for the barrel of the soldier’s rifle, but he pulls the trigger before she can stop him. Sammie’s head snaps back and to the side. Blood bursts from her forehead where the bullet strikes, and she vanishes behind the rubble falling from the collapsing ceiling. There’s no way she could have survived the gunshot wound, let alone being buried underneath tons of granite, and yet the blood guiding Mira past the station and over the precipice tells a different tale.
A rumbling sound draws her attention to the fjord, where an icebreaker cuts through the black waters in the distance. The enormous ship must be three hundred feet long, with a seventy-foot-tall bridge crowned with satellite antennas and golf ball-like radomes. A helipad platform dominates its foredeck, while its aft deck bristles with cranes. She’s never seen a seafaring vessel travel this far inland.
Her breath catches in her chest.
“Oh, God,” she whispers, glancing toward the rounded edge of the station, which hangs out over the escarpment, perched precariously on stilts. A faint green shimmer passes between the girders, then vanishes again. She breaks into a sprint and races toward the narrow path traversing the rim of the cliff and wending into the shadows underneath the facility. “No!”
Rush calls to her from behind, but she doesn’t dare slow down to reply. Not while there’s still a chance of catching up with Sammie before she can—
Mira slips, lands on her hip, and slides over the edge. A glimpse of open air, the frozen lake, far below—
Whoof.
Her breath bursts from her lips as she slams into a boulder and flops to the ground. She gasps for air, but none will come. Pushes herself to her hands and knees. Crawls. Casts a panicked glance down at the fjord.
Water parts before the icebreaker, waves riding up its hull. It veers toward the southern side of the channel, its momentum slowing as though in preparation of docking with the dam.
The pressure in Mira’s lungs breaks and frigid air floods into her chest. She sobs in relief and scrambles through a gap between stilts into the deep shadows. Only the faintest hint of the northern lights passes through the storm, imbuing the ice surrounding her with violet and emerald—
Movement overhead.
A spectral form scurries upside down across the silver siding and out over the nothingness. Broken bones protrude from Sammie’s misshapen appendages, her torn flesh sealed by webbing that positively glows with chimeric microorganisms.
“Sammie!” she shouts.
Her friend stops and twists her head all the way around so she can see Mira. There’s nothing left of Sammie inside those cold black eyes. Her mandible appears to have fractured right down the middle. It opens outward like chelicerae, revealing her fanglike teeth and the swollen ducts underneath her tongue. Her forehead’s a craterous ruin where the bullet took a bite out of her frontal bone, the ragged edges of which are knitted together over her exposed brain like fibrous stitches.
“Let me help you!” Mira calls, loud enough to be heard over the wailing wind. She wraps one arm around the nearest support post and reaches for Sammie with the other. “Take my hand! We’ll figure this out together!”
Sammie’s brow furrows, and a crimson tear squeezes from the corner of her eye.
She lets go and plummets into the canyon.
“No!” Mira screams.
Cameron hurdles the last flight of stairs, hits the landing, and lunges onto the icy path. He slips on the loose rocks. Rights himself. Accelerates again. He can’t risk slowing down, even under such hazardous conditions. The thought of someone like Waller tinkering with that organism in a lab pushes him even harder.
He hears Speedy’s footsteps on the slick trail behind him, but he can’t spare a glance back for fear of losing sight of the men from NeXgen, who intermittently appear from the blowing snow ahead of him. Waller’s almost to the final straightaway leading out onto the dam, a silver canister clutched under his arm like a football, while Kato trails him by a good fifty feet, a red plastic bag swinging at his side.
Kato abruptly stops and looks straight up—
A blur of motion materializes above him, like the slipstream of heat trailing a comet, and he collapses to the ground. Bones break with an audible crack! He screams and struggles to crawl out from beneath a faintly green shape. A wet slapping sound and the skin on his face begins to blister. He turns toward Cameron as his flesh melts away from his cheekbones and teeth. His eyes widen in panic and he reaches—
Another emerald blur, and his cries cease.
Cameron pulls down his thermal lenses and the world turns black, save for the purple and orange figure crouching over the fallen man, whose golden blood floods out across the ice. The figure rises and stares at him through eyes like twin glowing suns.
The ground falls out from underneath him.
There’s no mistaking Dr. Rantanen, nor the massive wound on her forehead where he’d shot her.
Cameron raises his rifle and pulls the trigger, but his target’s already on the move. Bullets ricochet from the ground behind her heels as she propels herself from all fours to two feet, moving far faster than he can. She runs out onto the top of the dam, her head and shoulders barely visible over the raised concrete sides, heading straight toward the observation center. A second figure is nearly already upon it.
Waller.
The conning tower of the icebreaker rises above the structure’s roof, an orange cloud of exhaust diffusing into the storm behind it.
Cameron knows exactly what he needs to do.
