Beyond the Ice Limit

34

IT WAS BY now after dawn and Patrick Brambell was mightily relieved to be alone in his medical quarters, without Glinn or his assistant, Rogelio, breathing down his neck. He wanted to be alone, to think, to contemplate, to figure this thing out. He never could think clearly when there were other people around, and he was particularly relieved that he’d gotten rid of the shadowy presence of Glinn, lurking in the background like a specter. That, and the four workers in the adjoining exobiology lab, who—hours before—had grown as boisterous as a bloody frat party and he’d almost had to go tell them to pipe down.

In the silence, he got back to work.

In front of him, arranged with precision on the gurney, were the remains of Alexandra Lispenard. It was a singularly gruesome sight, much of it looking like coarse-ground hamburger mingled with mashed bits of flesh, shot through with shreds of clothing, strands of hair, and fragments of bone. Having arranged and rearranged just about every piece over the course of the last several hours, he had become thoroughly numbed and now gazed upon the scene not with horror but with scientific detachment.

The problem, he mused, was simple. If the crushed DSV was indeed a pellet—a shite—then the creature had to have absorbed some nourishment from it, the same way an owl ate a rodent whole, digested its flesh, and expelled the bones and fur. Nothing else made sense. The DSV seemed intact, nothing missing or dissolved, and besides it was hard to imagine the creature eating metal, glass, or plastic. It seemed much more likely it had digested or absorbed some of Lispenard.

He wondered exactly what that might be. It could have been her blood: naturally, the body was completely drained of blood, all five liters of it. But he remembered from the video of the recovery of Paul that there had been a faint cloud of blood trailing away from the crushed DSV when it was first discovered.

So the creature probably hadn’t absorbed the blood. It had washed away.

What he needed to do was weigh the body and see how much, if any, was missing. That could help him determine what had been absorbed.

He called up Lispenard’s chart on his computer and noted that her weight had been fifty-eight point eight kilograms. With the blood gone, that would lighten the remains by five kilograms, for a total weight of fifty-three point eight kilograms. The amount of wet clothing embedded in the remains, he calculated, was about one kilogram.

The gurney came with a built-in scale. He unlocked its weighing latch, activated the keypad, and waited while the digital screen ran through the kilograms.

It stopped at fifty-three point three kilograms.

So the body was missing about one and a half kilograms of weight. Some of that might be pieces they’d missed, or other liquids, such as lymph or bile, that had dispersed into the ocean. But some, if not most, of that liquid would have been replaced by salt water. Brambell was pretty sure he’d gotten every last piece of her. They’d been fanatical about it, and the pieces had sort of clung together in a stringy way, one leading to the next.

What part of the human body weighed one point five kilograms?

The answer came to him immediately. The brain.

Brambell exhaled loudly in chagrin at his stupidity. Here he had carefully assembled the face and skull on the gurney: ears, nose, lips, hair, the works. But he’d forgotten about the brain. Where was it? He bent over the gurney, but there was no trace of it. Could they have overlooked it when extracting the body from Paul?

No. Impossible.

Could the brain, which was also watery, have dissolved and drifted away in the extreme water pressure?

The feeling he’d had when they’d taken apart Paul, back on the hangar deck—the feeling that something wasn’t quite right—came back again now, full force.

He picked up a pair of rubber tweezers and leaned over the assembled cranium, turning over the largest pieces of skull. The inside of the cranium was totally clean—licked clean, one might even say. Even the dura membranes normally found inside the cranium were gone—gone completely. And those were tough.

He pulled the tray of surgical tools close and carefully dissected the first two cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. They had survived the crushing fairly intact. He quickly located the main anatomical points, the dens of axis and the transverse ligament of axis. With the utmost care he rotated C1 and teased apart the partially crushed mess to expose the vertebral foramen. There, inside, he found the spinal cord enclosed in the thecal sac. The top of it, right where the cord emerged from C1 and connected to the medulla oblongata, looked precisely as if it had been cut with a scalpel. Indeed, it had a seared aspect that suggested heat had been involved.

“Bloody hell,” Brambell muttered to himself. He was utterly discomposed. Had the creature eaten the brain? But no: that didn’t seem likely, given such a clean-cut removal. Rather, the bastard had—with almost surgical precision—taken the brain.

Brambell backed away from the gurney, a feeling in the pit of his stomach that was not good. He took a few deep, shuddering breaths. And then, recovering himself, he did a quick bioassay of the brain stem. Then he pulled off his gloves, hung up his apron, washed his hands, straightened his lab coat—and went off to look for Glinn.