Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

With a lot of cursing and gesturing, Brink was calling back the two Matis forward scouts, one of whom still had his shotgun out. The armed woodsman shrugged and replied in low tones as Brink angrily berated him.

“What happened?” called Vedala.

“He says he put one out of its misery,” said Brink.

“Right. Keep your men back. We’re holding here until we can get a full sitrep,” ordered Vedala, just as Brink began to walk out toward the nearest primate corpse.

“Stay with me, Sergeant,” added Vedala, firmly.

The large man kept walking a few steps, then thought better of it. Gesturing to the Matis to join him, Brink returned to lean against a tree. Unlatching the stubby battle rifle from his chest, he began to clean the barrel with a worn piece of rag.

Vedala turned to the group of scientists, speaking with urgency. “Something killed these animals. We need to know what it was, right now.”

James Stone had crouched on a tree root, his eyes fixed on the monitor hanging from his neck. With quick gestures, he directed the canaries to survey the field of corpses, the soft whir of their rotors the only sound in the still jungle.

“Not picking up any airborne toxins,” he reported.

Squinting into the shadowed jungle, Vedala studied the minefield of simian corpses stretched out before them. The Matis had gathered together, speaking urgently among themselves and not making any move to proceed. Peng had already retrieved her portable field laboratory. The device was half unpacked from a dirt-streaked hard-case. She was methodically ripping open the vacuum-sealed equipment from its Chinese-marked packaging.

Staring into the wilderness with naked concern, Odhiambo began to ruminate out loud.

“These primates are not the same. They are separated by species,” he said. His eyes rose to survey the canopy.

“They fell. Moving through the trees. In two lines.”

After conferring quickly with a Matis in both sign language and broken Spanish, Odhiambo turned back to the group.

“He says the black ones move faster than the red ones. That must be why they made it farther. It also tells us the direction they were going.”

“They were running from something,” concluded Vedala.

“If the lines are concentric arcs,” added Peng, “it means they were all running from the same thing—a single point in the jungle.”

“Our anomaly?” suggested Odhiambo.

“We’ll see,” said Stone, tapping his screen. “I can use the radius of the arcs to estimate an origin point.”

On Stone’s command, the swarm of canaries rose higher, their flickering shapes milling about in the lower canopy. From around sixty feet up, the dotted remains of the monkeys took on a clear pattern of two arcs.

Stone reverse-pinched the screen to zoom out to a larger map, largely blank. Each corpse was marked as a black dot. Drawing with his fingertip, he connected the dots until he had traced an entire rough circle.

And in the dead center, their destination waited.

“Dr. Odhiambo is right,” said Stone. “They were fleeing the anomaly.”

Looking up, Stone was startled to see Vedala leaning beside him, her cheek nearly pressed against his as she peered into the monitor. A low-resolution live video feed in the corner showed the sneering face of a dead monkey. Its lolling tongue was streaked with what looked like gray ash.

“What the hell is this?” she asked, pointing and looking into Stone’s face.

Suddenly aware of how close she was to Stone, Vedala backed up, stumbling over a root. Under a layer of dirt and sweat, she was surprised to feel heat rising on her cheeks.

“There was something in its mouth,” she said, covering her embarrassment. “You should have pointed it out immediately. It’s a disease marker.”

On her knees in the dirt a few yards away, Peng had finished assembling her portable field science kit.

“I’ll tell you what it is. But we need a sample,” she said.

The scientists looked at each other, and even the Matis guides perked up, watching to see who would volunteer.

“I’ll do it,” said Vedala.

Reaching into the kit slung on her hip, Vedala retrieved a half-face respirator. She pulled the contoured device down over her mouth and nose. It was dark blue and smooth, with two cylindrical black filters on either side. Slipping on a pair of purple nonlatex exam gloves, she took Peng’s sample kit and tromped away toward the nearest corpse.

“Wait for me,” said Stone, pulling on his own respirator. “I’m going, too.”

ENVELOPED IN A cloud of a dozen canary drones, the two figures moved through shadowy layers of undergrowth. The rest of the field team watched silently from afar as the two were engulfed by the jungle.

The day was already nearly half over.

Fortunately, the sample retrieval process was brief and proceeded without event. Of more importance is the unknown exchange that occurred between Nidhi Vedala and James Stone while they were momentarily alone.

Returning from the jungle, Nidhi handed the sample bag to Peng and then turned to the sergeant. Getting directly to the point, she asked Eduardo Brink whether he was aware of any immediate danger to her team. Fixing a steely glare on James Stone, the sergeant crossed his bulky arms and responded that the team was not in any more or less danger than they had been upon their arrival.

Stone-faced, Brink issued a final bit of advice: “There’s nothing out here I can’t handle. Trust me, I’ve got instructions for every eventuality.”

These words would turn out to be fateful.

Meanwhile, Peng Wu had begun to fit the test tubes into a vacuum-sealed portal of her portable laboratory. The contents of each vial were sucked into the compact machine, where they were pulped by a diamond impact hammer, and various specimens were routed to different compartments.

In this way, Peng was able to run dozens of experiments with her miniaturized and specialized hardware. She also had the benefit of already knowing the findings of the scientists who survived the first Andromeda incident.

First, she used the mass spectrum analyzer to determine that the gray ash exhibited a chemical signature matching Andromeda (confirming the onboard sensors of the Abutre-rei drone). Even with the added granularity of chromatography, however, she could not determine whether the sample was an exact match to AS-1 or AS-2. Such results would require either comparison to live samples, or more advanced (and nonportable) lab methods such as X-ray crystallography.

Isolating the positive samples, she nonetheless continued to experiment.

Next, Peng tried to stimulate growth. Routing samples to environments with varying levels of vacuum, carbon dioxide, and ultraviolet light, she exposed each to a variety of potentially reactive substances, including fabric, epithelial tissue (i.e., skin), and Vedala’s inhibitor substance.

The samples refused to react in any way, save for two exposures: blood and latex. And in both of those cases, environment did not seem to matter in the least to the voracious microparticle.

Focusing her final (and rather limited) light microscopy analysis on these two reactions, Peng was perplexed to observe a mix of outcomes. On direct contact with blood, the infected samples caused coagulation at an alarming speed. Similarly, exposure to latex created a dustlike substance. Both patterns had been seen before in AS-1 and AS-2.

It was what happened afterward that put a dismayed frown on Peng’s face.

The microparticle seemed to grow visibly larger, self-replicating on exposure. With limited scientific resources in the field, Peng could not observe in any finer detail. Based on the outcome, she assumed her samples had been cross-contaminated and deemed the results largely untrustworthy.