Doom 3™: Maelstrom

2145

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE FIRST OUTBREAK

1

THE MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE THE ROBERT BALLARD DEEP OCEAN LAB DEPTH: 18,674 FEET, OUTSIDE TEMPERATURE: 178 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT DATE: 03_11_2145

DAVID RODRIGUEZ LOOKED AT A SEISMIC map of the ocean floor, focusing on the mammoth Mid-Atlantic Ridge—the world’s greatest mountain chain, although miles under the surface of the ocean.

He saw a massive network of fissures—potential problem areas—all at different depths, spread throughout the ridge. Each area fed a steady stream of real-time information to the lab’s computers.

Only days ago the lab got an early warning about a good-sized plate shift that was bound to produce some major fissures. But the information coming from the probes—detailing the stress to the continental plates, the depth of bedrock, the possible path of erupting magma—showed that the Ballard Lab itself was not in any danger. Good thing too. An evacuation would be costly, not to mention years of work lost down the hydrothermal tube.

But the probes also showed that this latest seismic spur would create a new series of thermal spouts not too far from the lab.

David turned back to the open work area behind him. Giant tanks housed specimens, all surrounded by teams of his scientists working at self-contained modules near the tanks. No closed offices or lab rooms here—as lab director, David Rodriguez had a say in the design and he wanted everyone coming down here to feel that no matter what they were working on, they were all part of a team.

What one discovers, we all discover, he always told them.

And though practically everyone down here was bristling with credentials—many more so than others—there would be no “Doctor this” or “Doctor that.” Including Rodriguez himself.

“¿Ola, Tomas, cómo van las cosas hoy?”

Tomas, who held advanced degrees in genetic microbiology and molecular physics, looked up and smiled. “Muy bien, David. Though we hope to get our hands on some of the new samples”—he nodded his head to the great ocean past the massive walls of the lab—“out there.”

David laughed. “I’m going out there soon. Just waiting until things settle down a bit.” He turned to the big 3-D view of the ocean floor behind him. “So far, things are looking good.”

“I know. This really could be the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”

David nodded in agreement, and started for the east end of the podlike lab.

Amazingly, the design of the lab’s transport pod was based on an old vid about space travel. Even the submersibles were modeled on the shape of the EVA vehicles on the spaceship in that film called 2001, now nearly 200 years old. Not that anyone really watched the old vids anymore.

But that carefully researched design for space made absolutely perfect sense for the deep ocean environment, where the pressure could get close to one thousand atmospheres and the temperature plunged to well below the zero mark, though nothing ever froze thanks to the water salinity.

The door to the submersible bay opened, and Julie Chao walked in.

“Morning,” David said quickly.

Once they had been together, back at Woods Hole—partners in life and in science. Not anymore. But when he planned the lab, he knew he’d want Julie working with the team. Both thought they could get past their past. Easier said than done, David realized.

But then, they both worked hard to remain professional and to avoid any letting down of their guard and slipping into—what? Friendship? Remembrance? Nostalgia for the good times they had? Or maybe bitterness at how and why it ended?

“Is it morning? I gave up keeping track of when it’s day or night. How quaint of you to keep it up,” Julie remarked.

He smiled. She always did have a bit of an edge.

“Right. Okay, everything all checked out at your end?”

Julie nodded, even as she slipped into the bulky suit that would provide an extra measure of temperature protection should they hit an area where the thermal currents spiked and the water went from below zero to two hundred degrees in seconds.

“Yup, all set. Everyone’s excited about getting samples from the new vents.”

“I know. Completely virgin compounds in the process of being—I don’t know—born.”

She laughed at that. “If you can call it birth.” Then she looked at him. “You are coming along with me, right?”

David nodded. “Right. I’ll suit up. We’ll take submersible number one.”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

With that, David started getting into his suit, checking as he did that the biometric functions kicked in, tracking all his vital signs, sending the information to the lab. When he was ready, the technicians opened up the first sub door and David followed Julie into the incredibly tight space.

“Okay. All set here,” David said.

“Roger, David. Airlock closed behind you. Julie, all your equipment reading okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Julie said.

“Right. Ejection in thirty seconds.”

They sat there and waited. David turned to Julie, who looked straight ahead, eyes on the Christmas tree—like an array of colorful buttons and lights. The submersible had three small ports, one dead ahead and two others to the side. Because of the tremendous pressure, the windows to the outside world had to be small, and the reinforced polymer “glass” inches thick.

The sub was silently and smoothly ejected through the airlock.

The outside cameras provided a much better view than could be seen in the port in front of either passenger. Now the screens above them showed the view as the sub glided away from the lab toward the underwater mountain range, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Years ago, David’s team had navigated and mapped a series of valleys that cut into the nearest undersea mountains. David knew which valley gave them a clear shot to HTVR-1138—the new Hydrothermal Vent Region 1138.

Now Julie guided the sub between two massive mounds with just enough space to slip between them. Some abyssal creatures, a light-dangling angler fish and the always bizarre pelican gulper eel, came by to explore.

They don’t get many visitors around here.

“Everything good, Julie?”

“Yup—nice and smooth. The temp readings are about what we’d expect.”

David knew that these subs were not the newest toys out of the UAC’s box. Their real attention stayed locked on Mars and the much-vaunted Mars City. This deep-ocean lab had turned into a neglected sideshow for Kelliher and his team of advisers in California.

Was the day coming that it would be shut down? That could well happen if nothing practical came out of the lab, and soon. The lab had been promoted to the world as a general oceanic research center specializing in finding new methods of desalinization and use of ocean resources, but David knew that—for the UAC—there was a much larger goal. Toward which there had been very little progress.

“Whoa—there’s something!” Julie tapped a button in front of her.

David looked down and saw that the outside water temperature was beginning to spike. Which meant that a current of superheated water had just hit the sub.

“Think we’re okay to go on?”

“For now. But we best watch it. Got the new vent field coming up dead ahead.”

David looked at the large screen above their heads. Twin Cameron lenses provided a wavy 3-D image of the world ahead—wavy due to the blurring effect of the volcanically heated water.

And as the sub glided forward almost soundlessly, both of them gazed at a sight that simply never became anything less than staggering.

First they saw the crab colonies—gatherings of giant albino crabs that, unlike their more prosaic seashore cousins, worked and hunted together, acting more like ants. The fact that they were bleach-white and each was the size of a kitchen table always made the initial glimpse of this alternate world an amazing one.

Then they spotted other crustaceans hanging around the periphery, perhaps hoping to scarf up whatever the crabs left over. One of them—for David, the most disturbing creature down here—was the gyanthomous, an isopod the size of a golden retriever. To witness it was to think that it was impossible that it came from Earth.

“Tube worms coming up,” Julie said.

From out of the mist of blurry volcanic water and flecks of debris, David watched the field of tube worms appear. These worms—some standing twenty to thirty feet tall—were the true dominant life-form down here. The tube worms hosted the parasitic bacteria that somehow took the sulfurous water, poisonous to any other creature, and turned it into food that the worms then consumed. A perfect and incredible symbiotic relationship. And the fact that the food produced resembled hemoglobin in its chemical makeup was still something that confused scientists, even a hundred years after the worms’ discovery by Robert Ballard. Many of the station’s best teams worked on finding out where this life came from, how it developed, and how it might evolve in the future.

Julie edged the small sub up and sailed it above the massive tube worm field, as the worms repeatedly sucked in the poisonous water, each feeding its own colony of bacteria. The sharp temperature spike—the stray current—seemed to have veered away.

“Always something to see, isn’t it?” David said.

“That’s for sure.”

Something—as in a complete ecosystem that has absolutely nothing to do with photosynthesis. Nothing to do with any system of life found on the surface at all. This was as close to an alien world as David could imagine.

Yet, here it was, ancient, thriving—and David, along with the others on his team, felt it had things to say. About planet Earth. About humanity. Maybe about humanity’s ability to survive.

Let everyone else keep their eyes on Mars. For David, down here was where the real mystery of life lay.

“Okay, going to start heading over toward the new vents,” Julie said.

David nodded as she banked the submersible to the right, away from this mature vent field, away from the looming “smokers” ahead—the mini-volcano-like openings—to where Mother Earth had just recently cracked open a bit more.

And life—a different kind of life—was about to begin.

2

“THERE WE ARE,” JULIE SAID, LEANING CLOSER to the porthole.

“Got a better view on the screen here.”

She turned to David and smiled. “I like seeing the real thing. I’m kinda old-school that way.” Julie turned back to the screen.

David looked at the 3-D image, which made it appear as if the open fissures and new smokers were inside the submersible.

“Always amazing,” he said. “The earth opens up, and hundreds of degrees of molten magma gets squeezed out. Beautiful—”

“Yeah, and a bit terrifying, too. We best get busy gathering the samples.”

David leaned down and grabbed the handle-like grip of the controllers for the sub’s left arm. The controllers allowed for a variety of deep-ocean operations. To start, David began collecting water samples, the amount of sulfurous and chemical material rising with each sample. Julie did the same thing with the other arm, but then she stopped and took the submersible down a few feet closer to the surface.

“Now for some bottom grabs,” she announced. The goal was to get a range of samples that showed the increased concentration of the strange chemical mixture, which might lead to an understanding of the origins of this bizarre ecosystem of hydrothermal vents.

David hit some control buttons for his exterior arm, and now the claw shifted and he could carefully scoop the top layer of ocean bottom material, which already bore a frosting of the debris that drifted over from the smokers.

“How you doing?” Julie asked.

“Good. And the temps? Time to turn around?”

“Whoa—yeah. Must be a big fissure. Heat’s getting up there fast. We got what everyone wanted. New material, freshly deposited. So—”

David looked up at the screen. The open fissure was closer now, the new chimneylike smokers pouring out a steady stream of superheated water and magma. He waited, expecting to see the submersible start rising and then sharply banking away for the volcanic area ahead. When it didn’t move, he said, “Julie?”

“We’ve got a problem…. Engine’s not responding. We’re heading straight toward the new vent area.”

“Umm…ideas?”

“I—”

David could see the other controls responding normally, including the temperature gauges, which now began to sound a single shrill beep. Not loud, not yet—

“Julie? It’s your call.”

She turned to him. “Really? Okay, I’m thinking.” She shook her head. Whatever it was she was going to do, it better be damn fast. “Okay. My call. Only one thing I can see that we can do. Shut the whole thing down. Then a full system restart and hope the engine controls come back online.”

“What…are we in the Stone Age? Turn it off?”

“You said it’s my call. It’s all—”

“Fine. Do it.”

As fast as she could, Julie hit the master control switches that shut down every system on the submersible, from the air scrubbers to the massive interconnected electronics packed into the small sub.

Then…they floated, suspended in the dark, still only feet from the bottom, the air immediately turning stale, the temperature climbing by the second.

David held his breath, knowing that Julie would wait a precious few more seconds until she thought every system was truly down and off. He tried not to count.

Then he heard her: “Okay.” She started to throw the switches, moving faster than he ever saw any human move before. She followed the standard progression, internal electronics, system monitoring, outside data electronics, air scrubber, and finally main and secondary thrusters.

The warning beep immediately returned, but now as a steady, constant ping that was deafening. David forced himself to look away from the temperature screens. He didn’t need confirmation of what he could feel.

And once again they waited.

“Here goes,” Julie said.

The scrubbers had returned to their job of providing clean air, but the air was so hot that David breathed only when he had to. Glowing streams of magma filled the porthole screens.

3

THE ALARM NEARLY DROWNED OUT THE whirring of the engines. But in a second, David saw the glowing smokers up close, ready to toast the sub, quickly vanish from the portholes as the sub finally arced upward. Then the sub made a sharp tilt to the right as Julie banked it, giving it all the juice she could.

There were no cheers, no exultations over a close call, because it was still anybody’s guess as to whether they could clear the vent field with enough leeway to avoid frying the sub’s systems. Because if that happened, they’d probably drop down to the field and bake.

All they did was sit silently and hope that the power of the engines and the angle of the bank would suffice. Please, David thought, let it be enough.

A few more moments, and the sub kept arcing away. But now David saw Julie level it off, keeping the engines at full throttle.

Then—a gift—the pinging stopped. The temperature still read dangerously high—a couple of hundred degrees outside—but now it started falling steadily.

David turned to Julie, feeling, as he often did, that persistent pull toward his ex. Sometimes breaking up with her seemed like the dumbest thing he had ever done. Or did she break up with him? Even that they could not agree on.

“You did good.”

“Could have gone either way,” she answered. Only then a small smile. “Like I said, I’m old-school. When in doubt, reboot.”

“Or kick the tires.”

A small laugh from both of them now that the threat of what would have been a quick and intense death had passed.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

“You got it,” Julie said.

And they sat amid the colorful lights, the air finally beginning to cool, both glad to be alive.

When they arrived back at the lab, David slipped out of his suit, clammy from the heat and humidity that, no matter what the scrubbers did, always somehow filled the submersible.

A crew worked at the front of the small sub, removing the pressurized sample cases. The material was good only as long as the temperature and pressure remained constant.

Julie said a few words to the lab crew, and then came over to David.

“I’m going to follow these inside. In case there are any questions.”

“And there will be. I’ll make sure engineering starts taking the sub apart to see what the hell went wrong.”

Julie turned and looked at the vehicle that nearly cost them their lives. “Age, probably. What is it? Tech from ten years ago?”

“Maybe earlier. This lab has stopped being a UAC priority.”

She laughed at that. “It would be one if it was on Mars.”

“Or Europa.”

She looked at him when he said that. David knew from their discussions that there were many things about this project that no one, not even the various scientific teams working on it, were aware of. But he and Julie also knew that it had a number of hidden goals way beyond economical desalinization and deep-ocean aquaculture.

And one of those goals was squarely centered on the frozen moon of Europa.

Frozen, that is, until you penetrated a few thousand feet of ice to the open sea below. Where, as any planetary geologist or biologist could tell you, anything might await.

“Okay, then. You go with the samples. I’ll catch up with you later.”

He watched Julie return to the team while he waited for the engineering head to arrive.

Chief Engineer Ozzie Stern, a thin, wiry man who, as far as David could remember, never smiled, listened while David described the sub’s failure.

Then Ozzie took a deep breath. “I keep telling you, David. These subs, I mean, jeez…” He shook his head. “How can you expect to keep them running? They’re all way beyond a full overhaul. If you want my opinion—”

David smiled. “Not sure that I do….”

No smile came back from Ozzie. “They should all be junked. Every damn one of them. Maybe used for parts. Put in some damn museum.”

“Good. Glad you got that off your chest. But what can you do for now”—David put a hand on Ozzie’s shoulder—“is to make sure that what just happened doesn’t happen again.”

“I don’t know. I’ll look. We’ll do our best. But no promises.”

“Got it. That’s all I can ask.”

David started to head toward the Bio Pod, but a few steps away he stopped and turned. “Oh, and if you can have them ready by, say, tomorrow, that would be just great.”

Ozzie shook his head like some disapproving father.

But as David walked away, he knew that the sub’s problem—at least the engine issues—would be solved by then. Ozzie was moody as hell, but he never disappointed.

The Biolab, the most secure area of the Ballard research station, could only be accessed by a select few teams at the station. Everything that went on here was, for lack of a better description, top secret.

David put his palm up for a scan, then entered his password. It all seemed a bit excessive.

As he walked in, he could see the teams already working feverishly. A trio of screens showed the bacteria-filled water magnified to the point where the samples looked like distant star systems.

Only here the “planets” whizzed madly around each other, pulsating.

Except this wasn’t really life. What was happening here, what was happening in the whole ecosystem of the hydrothermal vents, was really something else. You could almost call it anti-life. Organisms that could make food out of poisonous chemicals, and then provide that food to other organisms.

The bacteria took the poisonous sulfurous water and thrived on it, turning it into food that nourished the giant tube worms and ultimately fed everything that lived in the superheated world of the vents.

So many questions remained. Which was why Ian Kelliher of the UAC funded this station: he wanted answers. But apparently he also wanted more than that from this work.

“How are the samples looking?” asked David, standing behind Julie.

She bent over a microscope, choosing to examine the bacteria colony in the traditional way rather than with the 3-D screens.

“Great. The best we’ve had. I mean”—she straightened up and turned to David—“we’ve had good samples before, but they were always further along in the process.” She pointed to one of the screens. “See that cluster there? Never really caught that before. The bacteria coming together and making a small colony. As if exchanging information before they—Hey! There, look.”

David watched a cluster explode apart.

“They do that over and over. It has to serve some purpose before they begin producing the by-product that feeds the worms.”

“Almost like—” David caught himself. The idea was too outlandish.

But Julie prodded him. “What? What were you going to say?”

“Almost as if they were exchanging DNA information. Like strands of the helix coming together, matching up. Crazy idea.”

But Julie shook her head. “No, not so crazy. I mean, what else can we compare it to?”

David looked up at the computer monitors above each of the screens. “A lot of data coming in.”

“Yes. It’ll take weeks to analyze it all. Then we can let these bacteria begin their life cycle, and track that. But—for the first time—we will have monitored them from the very beginning.”

“Great. I’ll go give the boss a report. He’ll be pleased.”

“Maybe tell him about the subs? Drop a hint we could use some new ones.”

“Oh, yeah. He’d love to hear that. I think I’ll tell him right after he mentions he’s pulling the plug on this whole project.”

“Maybe just one new sub?”

Sharif Aziz, one of Julie’s team, looked up. “And maybe a few more bacteriologists. I’d like to get some sleep one of these days.”

“Sleep?” David said. “What’s that?”

They laughed. A good sound, David thought as he turned away and headed to his office, where a report to Ian Kelliher—head of the United Aerospace Corporation—had to be filed. Hooray, the fun part of the day was over.

4

THE SCREENS ON DAVID’S DESK SHOWED VARIOUS newsfeeds covering the wonderful state of the surface world.

Every day seemed pretty much the same: always a scattering of skirmishes and near wars across the globe as people fought over the planet’s dwindling resources. Politicians made promises, or threats, sometimes both simultaneously. Some corners of the Earth now seemed to be in constant turmoil as factions tried to assert their power over each other.

Then, there was Mars. A world away. “The Bright Red Hope,” as described in UAC promotional material. David had to wonder: Did people really buy into that? That somehow the Red Planet, so far away, could offer hope to this world?

The UAC didn’t, on the other hand, talk much about the Ballard sea lab. After all, while great strides have been made toward desalinization, making clean water more affordable and more readily available, the process still remained, for most of the planet, prohibitively expensive.

Such a simple matter, removing salt from water. It would be interesting if such an easy solution played a key role in the death of the late, great planet Earth. The water planet…and everyone on it dying of thirst.

But you could search all of the UAC’s official literature and find nothing about the work going on in the undersea lab. Only Kelliher and handpicked members of his board received David’s classified reports. And though David didn’t care much for Kelliher or his methods, he did believe in what they were trying to do here. If they showed some success, it could lead to saving life on Earth.

And were they close? Hard to tell. Breakthroughs seemed to loom around each corner—amazing discoveries, incredible possibilities. But he knew that Kelliher wanted—no, demanded—more than simply discoveries and possibilities. He wanted concrete results that the biological processes the lab explored down here could actually work.

David rubbed his eyes. After the last trip to the new vent site, he felt fatigued, tired from the stress, the exertion—or maybe simply exhausted by all the responsibility.

But Kelliher wanted his damned report right away. Well, at least it would only be a one-sided conversation.

David flipped a switch that activated the camera above the central screen above him. He hit some keys, switching from the live newsfeed to a screen on which he could access the entire lab’s database.

He entered his password, then opened up the directory, named by Ozzie Stein, whose Munich roots were showing. Wurm.

“Evening, Ian. I hope this report finds you in good spirits. I see, by the way, that work on Mars is moving right along.” David smiled at the camera. “Someday you’ll have to arrange a visit for me. Down here, we’re also keeping busy. And some interesting things have been happening. But first—”

David touched the floating keypad, and an image box appeared in the corner of the screen. “The subs are giving us a problem. I know you said that there was nothing you could do now. I know—funding’s tight. But, well, you see…Julie and I were nearly killed this morning thanks to a malfunction in one of the subs. Ozzie is looking all the subs over, but it’s simply a matter of age. If you could—I don’t know—but if we could get just one sub built to our specifications, well, it might save a life in the near future.”

Always the sales pitch. Like a beggar asking for a handout. How many times had David done this, and how many times had Kelliher counseled patience?

“If you could, Ian, just see what you can do. We’re very close down here, very close. So a new state-of-the-art submersible could make a big difference.”

And that was all true enough, David thought.

“Okay, now to the good news. We’ve successfully recovered early samples of the Dermatasporangium bacteria, at what looks like a primary stage of what Julie calls their ‘grouping’ process. We captured it all, and it will tell us a lot more about how they begin producing food and supporting the tube worm colony. But that’s not all—”

David touched some more of the holographic keys floating to his side.

“Our experiments on creating an artificial skin modeled on the tube worm’s exterior covering continues to be successful. The hemoglobin content, which you know is high in the worms, is still far removed from human hemoglobin. But we think, if we can track the progress of the bacteria, we can see where it diverges from human hemoglobin.”

David took a breath. He wasn’t sure he was going to tell Kelliher the next bit. But maybe, just maybe, it might allow some more funding to flow.

“I’ve sent you the experiment vids. If you get a chance—I know you’re busy with Mars—but take a look. We think we’ve made a bit of a breakthrough, and by using the bacteria to regulate the artificial worm skin’s development, we think we will soon have a key piece of the puzzle. We might actually be able to create a new form of synthetic skin that can self-replicate, along with a way to create virtually limitless human hemoglobin.”

David watched the image and vid files upload, and in a second they were on the UAC’s Palo Alto system, also securely locked.

“We’re close. So close. And as you know, if we crack this, well, you understand the next prize.”

The next prize. There was one that David had never believed in. But now? It all looked possible.

“Okay, Ian. Call, if you like, when you digest all of this.” Knowing that Kelliher rarely called. Things were much too busy in the UAC for the company head to actually call the deep-ocean station. “That’s it for now.”

David gave the camera one last smile, and then, with a wave of his hand, the news returned.

As David lay in bed, almost sleeping, he heard a knock on his small cabin door.

“Yeah? Come in.”

Julie opened the door a crack. “Oh, sorry. Thought, well, you’d still be up.”

“That’s okay. What’s up?” David immediately noticed that Julie’s face seemed tense, her eyes narrowed. She also had to be exhausted, because she tended to linger at the lab stations. Especially after what they’d brought in today….

“It’s something that just happened. Is happening, really. One of Sharif’s team. It’s something we both approved, no biggee.”

“You look—I don’t know—confused.”

A bit of a smile. “Yeah, you could say that. Want to get up? Come and look. Better than talking about it.” She took a breath, and David had that feeling that something was about to occur that would change things.

Still dressed, he slid out of his bunk and followed Julie back to the lab pod.

Three other biologists stood around Sharif, who sat before a trio of tanks, all monitored with cameras recording everything.

David walked up to them. “What do we have?”

Sharif turned back to him, his eyes wide. What was it that had the normally placid Sharif excited?

“It’s what we’ve done before, David. With the bacteria samples. But we never had them at this early a stage. So—”

“Hold on,” Julie interrupted. “Start at the beginning, Sharif.”

Sharif took a breath. “In there—we started as soon as you brought the samples back.” He pointed to the three tanks, all with a variety of sea life swimming about, looking not much different from any aquarium’s installation. “Every animal in the tank has a series of microtransmitters either embedded or attached to its body. In addition, the 3-D cameras catch all their movements and heat registers.”

Julie turned to David. “Our standard SOP. We injected some of the creatures with bacteria, and in other specially regulated tanks, we simply introduced the bacteria into the environment.”

“It didn’t matter,” Sharif said flatly. “Either way, it just…didn’t matter.” He hit some keys and the live feed from the tanks disappeared from the three screens, replaced by recorded images from twenty-eight minutes ago. “Look at the crab. He’s one we injected. He just froze up. We thought we had killed him. Now—okay, this is weird. Watch this.”

As David looked on, the crab seemed to raise its arms in a move that almost seemed to suggest a sudden surge of power. Then, with a breathtakingly fast movement, it somehow kicked itself off the bottom and latched onto a silvery blue fish nearly four times its size.

David watched the claws make short work of cutting into the fish, sending a spray of blood and guts into the water.

But the pieces of the fish didn’t last long there. As if they’d been waiting, other creatures in the tank swooped in, sharklike in their speed and determination, until in seconds not a bit of the fish was left.

“Wow.”

“Wow, indeed,” said Julie.

David leaned closer to the screen. “Am I crazy, or did that crab change? The claws somehow—”

Sharif nodded. “They’re bigger. Yes, they’re bigger! In minutes.”

David looked around at the other animals. “And the others in the tank—”

Sharif froze the images and tapped the screen directly in front of him. “Check out the baby barracuda. Normally hides behind that chunk of coral over there, trying to stay out of the other fishes’ way. Not after we introduced the bacteria.”

David watched as the small barracuda, missile-like, jetted right at a much bigger fish, drilling into it. Like the crab, it was all over in a matter of minutes.

“You have got to be kidding me. And for the animals not injected?”

Sharif actually grinned at that. “That’s the most interesting thing. For some, it didn’t matter whether they were injected or just came in contact with the bacteria in the water. They all reacted pretty much the same.”

Sharif let the images begin rolling again, and it grew impossible to keep track of the animals as some moved swiftly to destroy the others until, at the end, only a handful remained.

“The survivors…” David said.

“Precisely.”

He turned to Julie. “There are two things I don’t get.” He shook his head. “Maybe more, but, well, start with just the two.”

“Go ahead.”

“First, how come we haven’t seen this before?”

“Sharif has a theory….”

Sharif nodded. “Yes, all the other samples had already passed through whatever phase this was. There must be a window where this…event…can happen. We’ve never seen it before because we always got the samples much too late.”

“And your other question?” Julie asked.

“I thought—we thought—that the bacteria had a symbiotic relationship with the tube worms. Hell, with the entire hydrothermal vent community. This…doesn’t look too symbiotic.”

“Right. So that must mean—” Sharif paused.

David could fill in the blank. “It may not be a symbiotic relationship at all?”

No one said anything for a moment. The whole thrust of the work in these labs was to explore the ecosystem and bio-modifications of the vent life to see how it might be adapted for human use—might even save humanity from disappearing from the planet. But if the entire foundation, the whole premise, of the experiments was wrong, what then?

“I also have a question, not that any of us has an answer,” Julie said, turning back to the live screen and the tanks, which now held only a fraction of the sea life they once contained. “And it’s about the bacteria. What’s happening now with them, inside these animals? Is it like some kind of infection, which has now passed, or—”

“Yeah. Or is it like the tube worms, and maybe not so symbiotic at all.”

“Exactly.”

David took a step closer, going right up to the glass, looking at the dull fish eyes as they looked back. “For now, let’s hold off playing with these guys. I want us to check all the data, look at the vid records again, check everything. I don’t want one of these animals taken out until we know for sure what happened.”

A moment of silence. Then Julie said, “Or what may happen.”

5

UNITED AEROSPACE CORPORATION GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

IAN KELLIHER SHUT OFF THE VID DISPLAY floating over his desk. He liked David Rodriguez, but truth be told, the clock was ticking on the expensive and, so far, not very useful undersea lab.

Still, it had all been worth a shot. That’s why they called it research, after all. And Kelliher knew he had much bigger issues to deal with. In just thirty-six hours he would start getting some more important and credible reports from Mars, thanks to his sending Elliot Swann and Jack Campbell to Mars City. Both were totally loyal, and Campbell for one would let none of General Hayden’s or Dr. Malcolm Betruger’s bullshit get in his way.

Kelliher needed that information fast. The daily reports from his own labs, in the lower levels of the UAC campus, grew ever more confusing. Disturbing. His attempt to monitor Betruger by having his team here explore similar avenues of research hadn’t worked out too well.

Either Betruger was lying, or there was something specific about Mars that changed the experiments. Kelliher’s dreams of teleportation seemed further away than ever.

Then of course there was the case of the Ballard lab. That once shining ray of hope that so far had produced little, if anything. And now David Rodriguez was looking for more money, a new sub, just when Kelliher was thinking that he should close the whole thing down. Not that the lab constituted a majority of UAC’s financial resources—Mars City was UAC’s financial sump pump, sucking as much out of the company as it could.

Ian’s father would be mighty unhappy to see how low the company’s capital had fallen. And what of the experiments themselves, the promise of new revolutionary technology for the company? Old Tommy Kelliher had always acted on instinct, a maverick in everything he did and touched. He was the one person that Ian could talk to and get some feedback that—despite Tommy’s advanced age and a body held together by every medical breakthrough of the last half century—could still be sharp and incisive.

Kelliher pressed the side of the button-sized microphone on his jacket lapel. “Sharon, tell Sam I’m ready to go. And no escort, please. I don’t want a lot of attention.”

“Yes, Mr.—”

Ian touched the button again, cutting her off, and then he got his collection of images and charts together. Tommy Kelliher was old-school—if he looked at anything, he wanted to hold it in his hands, not see it floating before him like, as he put it, “some goddamn smoke in the goddamn wind.”

Ian Kelliher hurried out of the office and down to the indoor car park.

A voice came from behind him. “Sir, I do wish that you’d allow—”

Ian nodded. Sam had been his driver for ten years, right out of the military, a decorated lieutenant who didn’t mind this extravagantly well-paid job of chauffeur. Of course, that role was also amplified by the fact that Ian Kelliher required someone who was completely comfortable around weapons.

“Yeah, I know—you want me to have an escort. But then everyone knows my business, Sam. Everyone sees the boss heading out, chattering about where I might be going and why. Rumors, Sam—I don’t need them.”

“It’s safety that I’m concerned about, sir.”

“Yeah, well, they haven’t invented the bullet that can penetrate the glass and body of this car.”

Sam looked back, “There are bombs, sir, a well-placed thermo-charge as we drive over and—”

Ian laughed. “Just don’t drive over any, okay?” Besides the armored body of the car, there was a small arsenal up front available to Sam. If anyone was foolish enough to try to stop the vehicle, they’d face some of the best counterterrorism training that the USA and UAC could provide.

Ian turned and looked back at the sleek, castle-like profile of the main UAC building. Only two stories or so above ground, the heart of the headquarters, but a maze of labs lay unseen below, surrounded by a protective shell of bedrock.

The massive gate ahead opened, picking up the ID of the vehicle and actually scanning the passengers.

In minutes, they entered what was left of the California highway system. The interstate highways were hardly maintained at all anymore. Costs rendered that impossible, and troubles with a basic fuel supply meant that fewer people actually had need of them. Most of the other vehicles on the road here either had access to a private fuel supply, or—like Ian’s own car—sported what was essentially an earthbound version of the ion engine. Unbelievably expensive, rendering it really useless for ordinary travel, the engine required no fossil fuels, no water, but instead used the constant energy exchange of charges between ions to run a modified microrocket engine. Totally impractical for anyone who didn’t have more money than God. Which I do, Ian thought. There might have been a few other prototype ion vehicles on the road. Anyone who had one disguised it to look like a standard car. Best not call too much attention to what one was driving…

“Fewer and fewer…” Sam said.

“Hm?”

“Cars. Every time we come out here, there are fewer cars. Someday, maybe there’ll be none.”

“It’s a changing world, Sam.” Then, almost to himself: “And cars are the least of it….”

Sam avoided a massive hole in the lane he was in; it looked like a bomb had landed on the road. Then he cut right, heading to the off ramp, into what was once wine country and now was as dry as a desert.

His father’s compound was ten minutes away, and Ian reviewed what he was going to talk to his father about, the hard questions he needed help with….

Ian Kelliher’s car passed through the security gate while a bank of scanners scrutinized it for anything out of the ordinary. Ian could remember when he was a kid, his father would pull him aside, lecturing him about how they could only “get” you if you didn’t think of everything. “You have to want yourself alive more than they want you dead, hmm?” Then he’d laugh as if it were some kind of joke, repeated over and over. But it was no joke for Tommy Kelliher. He believed that there was a legion of people who’d want him gone, permanently, not just deposed as head of the all-powerful UAC.

And here Tommy was, retired, safely ensconced in a fortress, still protected by an array of programmed defenses and a small army of guards, both on the grounds and inside the mansion, whose loyalty to the Kelliher family and the UAC was unshakable.

“Do you want the underground, sir?”

Ian shook his head. Below the main mansion sat a parking lot that could accommodate over fifty cars. But today was a halfway decent day, some sun, not too much pollution in the air. Why not walk up to the front door like a real human?

“We’ll just park it in front, Sam.”

His driver nodded as the vehicle slowed. The modified ion engines began to shut down, switching over to the battery power that was more suited for slow speeds. The car stopped.

Sam hopped out first, took a look around. Two guards at either side of the door nodded. It’s like visiting a small country, Ian thought. Some crazed dictatorship with unlimited amounts of money and power and paranoia.

Ian got out of the car and hurried up the stone steps. The massive twin oak doors opened, and for a moment he felt like he was five years old again.

Ian sat in the house’s boardroom, so curiously old-fashioned with high-backed chairs, a wooden table carved from a single tree, cut from someplace where trees this large still existed. He didn’t have to wait long for his father to arrive, rolling in on a chair that had all the medical monitoring instruments of a small ICU. A pair of nurses trailed behind.

“Dad.”

The word sounded odd. Tommy Kelliher had always been an amazing character, a genius, a ruthless businessman, someone who had become more important and powerful than the president. Although he didn’t look too powerful now, sitting almost curled up in the chair, tubes and wires everywhere. Still, if you looked carefully at the old man’s eyes, there was still something there. Something that gave even Ian Kelliher pause.

The man’s lips opened, and the word was barely audible. “Ian.”

Ian gave a nod to one of the nurses, and she touched the back of Ian’s chair, raising the volume. The man struggled to get the word out. “To what do I…owe…this great…pleasure?”

Funny, Ian thought. I’m his son, and yet he’s viewing me almost like an opponent, another corporate bug to be crushed—if he had the strength.

His father’s hand were wrapped clawlike around the arms of the chair.

“Questions, Dad.”

Tommy Kelliher’s eyes squinted. Never exactly comfortable in the role of “Dad.”

“Advice.”

Tommy’s lips opened. A slight delay before the words came out. “You have advisers. You pay people…to do that already.”

Did he detect some scorn in those words? Ian had taken the UAC in bold new directions, and often merely kept his father in the loop these days. But it was Tommy Kelliher who had built the UAC, who had spearheaded the ion engine project, who had established the teams that would someday begin the early work on true molecular teleportation, the great secret work of the UAC.

Ian gave his father a smile. “But I want your advice. You might say I need your advice. Advisers or not.”

His father’s right hand opened and closed again over the chair’s arm, and the chair slid a few feet closer. Right into a pool of light. The man was alive—no doubt about that—but there were probably cadavers that looked better.

“Then ask…your…questions…” A big pause. “Son.”

Ian took a breath and began, hoping that the light in his father’s eyes would be matched with insight that, for some reason, Ian Kelliher felt was required.

6

IAN KELLIHER LOOKED AT HIS FATHER’S two nurses, which Tommy immediately noticed. “Don’t…worry. They know all my secrets anyway.” The women remained just behind the chair, as if they were an imperial guard for their ancient patient.

“Okay. And I don’t want to stay long. I know how all this…must tire you.”

Tommy Kelliher didn’t say anything, but just fixed his son with his eyes, the filmy pools now locked on. If there was one thing his father had, it was good instincts. Ian thought, He’ll know just how concerned I am.

“Mars City. Everything—on paper—looks fine. The reports on the work being done, the teleportation experiments, the progress, the setbacks. But—”

The old man’s tongue snaked out of his mouth. “But…not true?”

“Precisely. I have someone there, in the lab, working with Dr. Betruger.”

Tommy Kelliher’s eyes narrowed. Though Ian knew that Betruger had been essential to the ion engine project—in fact, it was probably impossible without him—his father didn’t like the scientist. Early on, his father had told Ian, “You need to watch him. That man could be very dangerous.”

At the time, Ian thought that he could control Betruger. In fact, he thought that he could control anyone. Now? Nothing but uncertainty.

“And…what does your mole…tell you?”

Ian turned to the wooden desk, ready to bring up a holo-screen. “I can show you what—”

The old man sputtered. “No, tell me. I can’t see…for shit. Use words, damn it. Remember words?”

Ian nodded. Though it looked as though his father’s eyes could see just fine, he started to tell his father everything. About the reports Betruger sent, the breakthroughs in transmitting living matter across space, the small setbacks, the overall tone so optimistic. The images that Dr. Kellyn MacDonald secretly sent back to Earth showed something far more horrific than some small setbacks. Using just…words, Ian described some of the still-living monstrosities that appeared in the lab, the limbs sprouting from all parts of the bodies, the elongated jaws, mutated almost to the point of being another creature.

Then Ian stopped. His father hadn’t moved during Ian’s monologue. And now he waited for his father to say something.

“Who else…knows?”

“Not many. The scientists in the lab, but they are all carefully monitored. Any communication they have with Earth is carefully screened. For security reasons, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And I have a few trusted members on the Palo Alto team who have seen the images.”

A slight nod from the old man. One of the nurses leaned forward slightly, looking at something at the back of the chair. Perhaps a slight increase in blood pressure? A bit of an uptick in heart rate?

“How are you handling…the situation?”

“Well, shutting down Betruger would be no easy thing to do. Even with my own team at the Palo Alto labs already getting some of the same results down here, he—”

His father’s eyes widened. The voice, almost taking on some of its former power, became louder. “You’ve been doing those experiments here?”

“Some. Only to double-check Betruger. But not on the scale he’s using; we’ve done nothing with human subjects, and we won’t—”

The old man’s eyes drifted away. “Anything else? Have you done anything else?”

“I’ve sent Campbell up to Mars, with full authority. Along with the UAC lead counsel, Elliot Swann. They’re there now and will report directly back to me, then I will decide. But”—Ian took a breath—“as you say…I have a lot of advisers. But it’s your advice I need.”

His father still hadn’t looked back, his watery eyes still gazing off into the distance. A slight grunt, an attempt to clear his throat, and then the man turned his head back. And damned if he didn’t look worried. The same look Ian saw in the mirror every morning.

The one person that Ian Kelliher could trust completely began to talk. “You know…that you are playing God, right, Ian?”

Ian shook his head. “God? Why? I mean, this is research that your people started, that you initially approved, and I’m just—”

“Just—what? Finishing what I started? I—I voiced my concerns about this Mars City, even with the government paying—” The old man’s voice rose, almost sounding strong, the Tommy Kelliher of years past. But then he began to cough, sputtering, as a nurse came around to see if there was anything she could do.

She glanced back at Ian as if to say, Do you really have to have this conversation with your father now?

Too bad. “Mars City was always part of the UAC vision.”

Tommy Kelliher nodded, taking care now. “For defense, for a community, but as a mammoth secret lab?” He shook his head. “No, that was all you.”

“The team felt that the full range of experiments couldn’t be done on Earth.”

“Couldn’t—or shouldn’t? And now, you don’t know what Betruger has done—or is still doing—up there. Even your mole may only know half of it.” He paused. “I never got into a situation where I wasn’t in control, where I didn’t know everything. But you have.”

“And the dangers?”

Ian’s father smiled a bit at that. “For me, not much. How long do I have, even with all this—” He waved a hand at the back of his mobile medical center. “But this planet, the people? Despite everything, the UAC was never just about profit or power. It was about doing something for humanity. But…what is this? What is it you’re doing? What are the dangers, you ask?”

“Yes.”

“You, my son, are trifling with forces that even our best scientists don’t understand. Our most brilliant physicists…they’re like babies, playing with these things. And it could be…could be… there are some doors that you open, that won’t close again.”

At that moment, Ian knew that his father—for all his age, for all his talk of being so close to death—had his own network of loyal spies who had shared everything that Ian had seen.

Ian licked his lips. “So—what should I do?”

His father looked away again, as if some ghost in the corner might have an answer. Then he started talking without looking back. “You’ve gone there yourself?”

“Yes, last year.”

His father looked up. “I heard you had…an accident?”

Ian smiled, betraying nothing. Jesus, he knows about that, too. “Someone went buggy. Fired a gun. Flesh wound. Nothing too big.”

“Not too big, eh? The wound—or the fact that someone snapped? And maybe more have ‘snapped’ since then?”

“It is…a problem. Not too sure what’s going on there.”

“You have Campbell there now? That’s good. And your lawyer—”

“Elliot Swann.”

“He’ll at least be able to deal with damage control, if needed. But—where is the Armada?”

The Armada?

Ian had to wonder why his father was asking about that. Like most of the off-Earth operations, the Armada was a joint US and UAC venture. Technology and the actual engineering of the ships themselves—that all came from the UAC, while the staffing and most of the financing came from the government. The six interplanetary ships of various sizes patrolled the solar system, ostensibly for scientific and exploratory purposes. But they also served notice on any countries who imagined that the UAC didn’t control space as well.

“The Armada is near Jupiter, and there is one small cruiser, the Centauri, in exploratory orbit above Europa. We have—”

“Call them back.”

“What?”

“You want them closer. To Mars. Leave that one ship near Europa, but the other ships should prepare to rendezvous closer to Mars and Earth.”

“That will raise questions.”

“So? You…you need to answer questions? Since when?”

Ian nodded. He could send an order through the military command in Colorado. The President would haul out the rubber stamp, not daring to question the move at all. The military high command might want to balk, but would they have the balls?

“Just get the Armada closer, Ian. Until you find out what’s really going on…on Mars. Until you have your final reports. If you have to shut down the labs, if you have to remove people, if you have to make sure no one talks—you can’t leave that to Hayden and a few squads of space marines.”

“So, in other words, make it seem like something routine. An exercise of some kind.” He took a breath. Then Ian Kelliher stood up in the great room. “I best get back.” He took a few steps away from the table, then turned around. “Thank you. And stay well—”

“One more thing.”

“Yes.”

“What about…Ballard?”

The undersea lab? Why was his father asking about that? “Nothing much new there. They continue their experiments, both those that are for public knowledge, and those that are not. But—”

His father raised his right hand, levitating it with difficulty from the armrest of the chair, a single finger pointing.

“There is something important there, Ian. Something that may be an even bigger secret…than what you have found with these experiments on Mars.”

“How do you know that? They haven’t—”

“Know? I don’t know it. But I do still have my instincts. The same ones—” Another barrage of coughs. His father waited. Then: “The same ones that led to the creation of the UAC. There is something ancient there. Don’t just forget them. Make sure that work continues. What that work tells you, you may need.”

And here Ian had been about to pull the plug on Ballard. “Right. Guess we can afford to let them continue.”

His father’s hand came down and pushed a button, and the chair rolled closer until father and son faced each other, inches away. A strange smell emanated from the man in the chair—the chemicals, the medicine, the aging flesh.

“You can’t afford not to, Ian. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

And then without so much as a nod, or even a good-bye, Tommy Kelliher pivoted his chair and rolled away, back into the recesses of the mansion, the two nurses dutifully following.

Ian hurried out of the room, out of the fortress-like mansion, out to fresh air and his car, waiting to take him back to Palo Alto.