Chimera, p.8
Chimera, page 8
“Is that what your team is studying?” Mira asked.
Moore offered a charming smile, his customary abrasiveness momentarily vanished. He was so much different in his element.
“In a roundabout way,” he said. “As you obviously know, I’m working with Anthony and Laurie, our resident geologist and oceanographer, on a study correlating undersea volcanic activity and climate change. In fact, our project dovetails quite nicely with yours. You see, those hydrothermal vents flood the ocean with toxic gasses and minerals, which are then consumed by unique species of archaea and bacteria, and strange creatures like tube worms, giant crabs, and colonies of mussels and barnacles. Together, they’re responsible for eliminating ninety percent of the methane—a greenhouse gas twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide—released from the Earth’s core. Were these ecosystems to fail, we would literally be looking at a doomsday climatic event. That’s not hyperbole. We would no longer be able to breathe our atmosphere and would die choking on our own vomit.”
“And on that cheery note . . . ” Elroy said, standing. “Someone needs to go outside and spray deicer on the turbines. Any volunteers?” He looked from Moore to Mira and gave a playful wink. “Everyone’s all about renewable energy until it comes time to brave a blizzard.”
His laughter trailed him down the hallway.
“I should very much like to see this biofilm of yours,” Moore said.
Mira beamed and opened her laptop. She was still logged in to the live feed from the cube. The water was dark and clear, the Plexiglas subtly defined by the sparse ambient light that penetrated the lake to its eighteen-foot depth.
“There’s not really a whole lot to see,” she said. She switched on the green light, and the contrast grew sharper. “It’s maybe four inches in diameter and invisible to the naked eye, at least until you cause it to iridesce.”
“I don’t see it,” Moore said.
Mira swiveled the laptop so she could better see. There was no sign of the biofilm. Her first thought was that it must have died, but even the deceased bacteria would retain some small measure of iridescence.
The truth struck her like a blow to the gut. She jumped to her feet, forgetting all about her laptop as she ran down to the lab and burst in to find Sammie shining a handheld green light across the surface of the aquarium, revealing the tiny filamentous appendages that had grown up the glass walls and over the rim of the tank.
“It’s gone,” Mira gasped, doubling over to catch her breath.
“What’s gone?” Sammie asked.
“The biofilm. It’s no longer in the cube.”
15
The Zodiac skipped across the waves, throwing frigid water into the air as it sped toward the cluster of buoys, little more than red dots bobbing against the backdrop of the island, its spires rimed with ice, like the towers of some mythical castle. Mira ducked her head against the spray and struggled to seat her diving helmet. She was already drenched underneath her drysuit, although she appeared to be in better shape than Sammie, who positively shook from the cold. Her lips were purple, her philtrum glistening with frozen mucus. She clung to the opposite pontoon with one trembling hand and attempted to buckle her compensator vest with the other.
Aaron manned the helm, while Jen stood beside him, leaning over the short windshield in her drysuit, her jaw muscles bulging in frustration. They’d rushed to meet Mira and Sammie at the boathouse the moment Mira had hailed them on the remote transceiver at the observation center. Neither of them had been thrilled that the microorganisms had somehow escaped into the open water with their whales, but that was the least of their worries. The odds of the biofilm harming such enormous creatures were infinitely smaller than the chances of it finding its way to the other side of the dam.
And once it was in the fjord, there would be no stopping it from reaching the Arctic Ocean, from which the unpredictable currents would spread it far and wide.
“We’re just being overly cautious,” Mira said, although she wasn’t sure whom she was trying to convince. “We probably could have released it into the lake on our own without any adverse effects.”
“Assuming it’s truly no longer in the cube,” Sammie responded through the speaker in Mira’s helmet. “That containment unit was designed to withstand a lot more than a whale can dish out.”
Mira bit her tongue. The enclosure itself might have been, but the membranes hadn’t.
The thumping of waves against the hull grew louder. Curtains of water splashed down on them. Mira clung to the rope strung down the length of the pontoon, her knees leaving the bottom every time the boat lurched from one swell to the next, rapidly closing the distance to the island, its towering formations stabbing into the belly of the advancing storm.
Aaron ramped down the motor and they floated toward the buoys. The wind screamed through the canyon, the bitter cold passing straight through their suits, the outer layers of which were already crisp with ice.
Mira leaned over the side. She could barely see the cube down there, its faint green outline at the farthest extent of her vision, at the point where the steel cables tethering it to the buoys converged. She’d left the light on and replaced the white LEDs in their diving flashlights with green diodes. If the biofilm were outside of the cube, its iridescence would be their only means of finding it, assuming it hadn’t been ripped apart by the current and scattered throughout the lake, seeding it with specimens too small to be detected by the human eye.
At least until they started proliferating out of control.
“These collection devices are airtight and more than large enough to accommodate the specimen,” Sammie said, removing four containers reminiscent of enormous canning jars from her drenched backpack, one at a time. “If you find it, be careful to capture it in its entirety. The webbing is more than strong enough to hold its biological components together, but it will tear upon contact if you so much as brush against it.”
Mira felt the press of time. With each passing second, the current carried the biofilm farther and farther from the cube. She hooked one of the containers to her diving belt, grabbed a flashlight, and, without a word, rolled back into the water. This time she was prepared for the cold shock, although it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. Her entire body clenched, her muscles locking up and her teeth beginning to chatter. The water trapped underneath her drysuit immediately started to freeze. Not that it mattered; she wouldn’t be down here for very long. If they didn’t find the biofilm right away, they’d never find it at all.
She released air from the compensator and turned on the green light as she sank, shining it toward the cube below her. By the time she reached it, it was readily apparent that the biofilm was no longer contained. Between the overhead light and the four handheld beams shining into it from as many different angles, it would have lit up like an emerald if it were still inside.
Mira pulled herself right up against the Plexiglas and inspected the dozen pencil-sized holes in each of the sides. The circular membranes looked almost like bubbles trapped in the tiny orifices.
“They all appear intact,” Sammie said through the speaker, unable to hide the surprise in her voice.
Mira nodded, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak the words they were both thinking. The biofilm had crossed one of the barriers on its own, which shouldn’t have been physically possible.
“Fan out,” Jen said. “Just don’t stray too far. Without someone on the surface to coordinate our movements, we could easily become separated.”
“This water is so cold that your body will start to shut down very quickly,” Aaron said. “And it won’t give you very much warning when it does.”
Mira watched the specks of microorganisms drifting on the current. It flowed slower than she’d expected, which was just about the only thing working in their favor. She drifted away from the others, using the cables to propel herself toward the distant island. She’d heard the waves breaking against it and knew that if the biofilm had floated that far, their hunt was already over.
She deflated the air bladders, just a touch, and sank into a haze of nutrients. The microscopic organisms sparkled in her light, like tiny bits of glitter in the pale green miasma, distant stars in a nebula millions of miles away, universes unto themselves.
The current abruptly shifted and the cloud dissipated.
“Not now,” she whispered.
“What is it?” Sammie asked, her voice tinny inside Mira’s helmet.
“The green lights attract the whales.”
As if to prove her point, a beluga whale fluttered past her, the light reflecting from its smooth white flank. A slow-motion wave of its tail fin and it was gone, leaving the water swirling in its wake.
“Whales are colorblind,” Aaron said. “They see in gradations of gray.”
“I wonder if this particular frequency of light appeals to them more than others,” Jen said. “Like how cats are drawn to red laser dots.”
“Or perhaps they’re responding to the temperature of the light, with green being a far warmer color than white, like diffuse rays of sunlight suddenly penetrating to their depth.”
Mira tuned them out and focused on the water around her. She was already so far away that she couldn’t see the others’ lights behind her. Her fingers and toes were growing colder by the second. She wouldn’t be able to stay down here much longer. With miles of open water surrounding them, finding a single gob of sludge was like trying to find a needle in a—
A flicker of green light caught her eye.
There it was. Maybe six feet away. Fluttering like a leaf of kelp as it rode the current.
Mira couldn’t take her eyes off of it for even a moment, nor could she risk calling the others, whose exertions would alter the already fluctuating hydrodynamics. She unhooked the container and fumbled with the lid until she was sure it was open. The mouth was maybe six inches wide, leaving her little room for error, especially with as badly as her hands were shaking.
The current carried her closer, until the biofilm was just barely out of her reach. She would need to use both hands, but she wouldn’t be able to see it without the green beam, so she wedged the flashlight underneath her arm and pinned it to her side. Her eyes burned from her refusal to blink as she drifted closer . . . and closer . . .
Voices crackled in her ears, stuttering from the cold. She couldn’t allow them to distract her.
The biofilm rippled. A shifting current struck her a split-second later.
She knew what had caused it.
A dark shape swooped through her peripheral vision to her right, passed behind her, and then appeared to her left. The beluga whale flashed past, the disturbance in the water buffeting the biofilm toward her like a plastic bag on the wind. It was too close now. She couldn’t allow it to hit her or it would break apart on impact.
The whale circled again, tightening its spiral around her back and appearing once more in front of her. It hovered in place, the green light reflecting from the tiny eyes on the sides of its head, its mouth curled into an almost comical smile. Without warning, it propelled itself straight toward her.
It was going to hit her, and it was going to tear right through the iridescent webbing first.
Mira lunged toward the biofilm, dragging the open container through the water as though in slow motion. The whale’s face grew larger behind it, bearing down on her.
She focused on the faint green glow and released the flashlight, the iridescence fading as the lens tipped down toward the ocean floor. The biofilm passed through the orifice as she closed the lid, sealing it a split-second before the whale dove after the falling light, its tailfin slapping her legs and flipping her head over heels in the water.
“I th-th-think I g-g-got it,” she said, righting herself and turning in what she hoped was the right direction.
She raised the container, but she saw only clear water inside. Her heart sank. Had she gotten it? If she’d somehow missed . . .
A greenish glow materialized ahead of her. She swam toward it as best she could in the restrictive suit. The silhouette of a diver appeared behind it, face shield reflecting the handheld light, which shone into the container, illuminating the iridescent green mass trapped inside.
16
Kangerlussuaq, Greenland
67.011646, -50.699777
Now
Cameron paces the frozen tarmac, his boots crunching on the ice. The wind chases his breath over his shoulder and cuts straight through his parka. He finds that the cold helps him think, sharpens him mentally, although he fails to reach the epiphany he seeks. There’s something he’s missing, something of critical importance that he needs to figure out before they arrive at Academy Station, where he can only imagine how bad the weather must be. Even down here, at the southwestern end of the country, it feels like the bare skin of his face might freeze, and his team is still nearly three thousand miles from its destination, way up above the Arctic Circle.
The engine of the fuel truck grumbles behind him. He hadn’t noticed that the refueler had finished his job. A fresh application of deicing and anti-icing agents once they were ready to taxi and the plane would be good to go.
He glances up at the terminal, a three-story gray building set into the naked hillside, where his men have been stretching their legs and loading up on coffee. They must have been watching from behind the tinted windows. As if on cue, they emerge from the bottom of the ramp and strike off across the apron toward him, bracing themselves against the tempestuous gales blowing across the frozen fjord, glazing the ice with a fresh application of sleet.
Ryder offers Cameron a steaming paper cup, ducks his head, and guides the others toward the crew steps leading into the belly of the Hercules. Cameron savors the warmth in his bare hands and nods to each of the men as they pass, his eyes never leaving the NeXgen contingent as they pick their way across the concrete apron. He takes a drink of the brew, which, given the situation, is far better than he’d expected, and precedes the four men into the plane, waiting for them to pass before closing the door behind them. The propellers roar to life as soon as he throws the latch.
“You guys are welcome to join us in the forward cargo compartment,” Cameron says, following the civilian contractors down the central aisle. “I promise we won’t bite.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ronny says.
Waller turns around and smiles at Cameron, his expression that of a parent with only so much patience left to give.
“We appreciate your offer, but we must return to our work,” he says. “There is much we still need to do before we arrive.”
The other three have already assumed the same seats inside the lead car of the SUSV. Cameron catches a glimpse of Dr. Stone on Kato’s tablet. The man across from him, Grant, has his laptop open on his thighs and an image on his screen that doesn’t look like any of the video logs Cameron has seen so far. It shows a hallway bathed in the red glare of emergency lights from an overhead vantage point, a blur of motion frozen in the middle.
Waller catches him looking, steps in front of him, and offers that same cloying smile.
“Well,” Cameron says. “The offer stands if you change your mind. Might be nice to all be on the same page when we land on a glacier in the middle of nowhere.”
“You just focus on doing your job, Sergeant. We’ll take care of the rest.”
Cameron nods in parting and heads toward the front of the plane, which slowly begins to taxi. He grabs the netting on the wall for balance and raises his cup to keep it from spilling as he navigates the narrow aisle, shouldering back and forth between the SUSV and the fuselage.
Rush glances up from his seat. Cameron raises the question with his eyebrows. His tech sergeant grins and moves his laptop so that Cameron can sit beside him. While everyone else was in the terminal, Rush had patched into the video camera inside the SUSV. It lacked sound and broadcast in black and white, but it was the next best thing to having someone physically inside the vehicle with the NeXgen crew.
“Those guys wouldn’t even hit the head at the same time as the rest of us,” Speedy says. “Like their shit doesn’t stink.”
“They’re just not the kind to slum around with the help,” Bashir says.
“There’s more to it than that,” Ryder says, his brow furrowing. “They know something—”
Cameron presses his index finger to his lips to prevent his rescue combat officer from saying anything more. While the men from NeXgen might have turned off their microphones, that didn’t mean they couldn’t still hear every word that passed through their headsets. For whatever reason, Cameron isn’t inclined to share his suspicions about the nature of the civilians’ involvement. At least not yet.
“I don’t care what those ass-hats hear,” Ronny says. “They can think whatever the hell they want about me. I won’t lose any sleep over it.”
Silver looks back over his shoulder, his eyes locking onto those of the senior airman. Ears aside, the two of them could have been brothers.
“What are you looking at, you ugly mother—?”
