Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

The growing distrust between Peng Wu and the rest of the team had just blossomed into full-blown paranoia. Peng had hard decisions to make in these few remaining seconds alone. It was not clear who among her colleagues had retained her trust, if anyone.

When Brink’s smiling corpse was discovered and searched by the rest of the field team later that morning, the Omega vial was no longer among his effects.

In the Morning Light

THESE WERE JUST MEN. NATIVE MEN,” SAID HAROLD Odhiambo, his voice somber. “More victims, among many.”

Pulling on a pair of purple exam gloves, the Kenyan scientist stood over the muddy corpse of a Machado. The small man was sprawled facedown in the dewy undergrowth. With careful movements, Odhiambo turned the body over.

The Machado’s cheeks were smudged with dried red urucum, his nostrils and lower lip pierced by bamboo shoots that splayed in a fearsome imitation of jaguar whiskers. These traditional adornments, subtly different than those of the Matis, confirmed the tribal identity of the body.

But that was not what most concerned Odhiambo.

The man’s mouth, open in a pained snarl, was coated in a grayish, ashy substance. His upper lip was caked with it. Most disturbing, the skin of his face was scabbed in hexagonal patches of what looked like metal.

“It appears to be the same material we found on the howler monkeys,” said Peng, watching from a distance. “Something farther in, probably the anomaly, has infected them. Infected this whole jungle.”

At the top of the Machado’s bare chest, Odhiambo made another grisly discovery—the puckered, bloody hole of an entry wound.

“He was shot down like a dog,” said Odhiambo, his voice cracking with emotion. “All of them were. Brink did this.”

“Would you rather he hadn’t?” asked Vedala.

Turning to Vedala, Odhiambo’s voice rumbled with deep anger. “If he were truly from FUNAI, Brink would never have shot them dead. Certainly not every single one. The indigenists are trained never to harm the indios bravos, only to scare them away.”

Odhiambo looked away with tired eyes.

“Die if you must,” he said, almost to himself. “But do no harm.”

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” said Vedala. “We still need to discuss our unfortunate Sergeant Brink. And I’ll need both of you to help with the examination, at the very least as a sanity check.”

Nidhi Vedala could feel that her team was balanced on the knife’s edge of panic. They had all silently realized that they’d been abandoned by their native guides. All were mulling the constant threat of another attack. The situation was bleak, even without factoring in the existence of a deadly contamination event somewhere ahead of them.

Quietly, Vedala was also considering the repercussions of missing today’s noon communications rendezvous with General Stern. She guessed that twelve hours of missed contact would likely result in a change of plans, giving the team until midnight to reach the anomaly and make contact. If the group was considered killed in action, Stern’s response would likely be drastic.

Looking at each of her team members, Vedala found herself thankful. The strict, mechanical precision of Peng Wu and the calm competence of Harold Odhiambo were comforting. It was James Stone, the robotics expert and last-minute addition to the team, who worried her. Moments ago she had brusquely ordered him to repack his crucial equipment. Now he was kneeling in the mud near the walking palm tree, muttering to himself as he worked.

Without porters, each scientist would have to carry a full load. Whatever couldn’t be repacked would have to be left behind. Even so, Vedala had given Stone the repacking order primarily to keep him occupied while the rest of the team examined the corpses. The sight of him had disturbed Vedala. His eyes were vacant over protruding cheekbones and a growth of reddish beard stubble. He had been rubbing his face and speaking in low tones about nightmares of “blood like dust on the wind.”

Leaving the struggling roboticist behind, Vedala pulled on a pair of latex-free examination gloves. She led the two other team members back to the remains of Sergeant Brink. His body was still leaning against the trunk of a rubber tree, that horrible smile stuck on his face.

As part of standard training, every member of the Wildfire roster had of course studied the incident in Piedmont. One of the first observations of the original field team was that the corpses did not bleed. And here, in the deep jungle more than fifty years later, Vedala found herself re-creating a field experiment she had only read about in historical case files.

With a scalpel, she drew a line across Brink’s muscled scapula, exposing the bone of the shoulder blade just below the preexisting wound. Peering into the clean, razor-sharp lip of the incision, Vedala could see each layer of the dermis in perfect relief—from the tan surface of the epidermis to the pale white dermis and the fatty yellow hypodermis. Below that was a layer of pink muscle and then whitish-pink bone with a clean notch in it.

Speaking into a voice recorder, Vedala noted what she was observing: “Deep laceration to subject’s scapula. The wound is clean of blood. A preliminary examination indicates the red blood cells are desiccated in the area near the wound, and possibly throughout the body. The corpse demonstrates no lividity.”

“In other words, his blood has been turned to red dust,” said a hollow voice.

The three scientists turned to see James Stone, standing gaunt and trembling a few yards away. His backpack was strapped on tightly, crowded with canary drones. For once the entire swarm was quiet, all of them perched on their docks to recharge. Stone’s eyes burned with a haggard intensity Vedala hadn’t seen before.

“It’s just like the first time. It’s Piedmont all over again. We should all be dead by now. I should be dead—”

“No, James,” said Vedala in a steady voice.

She didn’t like the way Stone was breathing in shallow gasps, or how his eyes were darting back and forth across the oddly upright body of Sergeant Brink. “It’s not quite the same as before. Look here. Focus.”

Vedala carefully tugged on Brink’s shirt, ripping the fabric open where it had been split. Peng Wu gasped audibly as the skin of Brink’s shoulder was revealed. Where it came into contact with the weeping sap of the rubber tree, the bloodless flesh had begun to meld with the bark.

Brink’s corpse was fusing into the tree.

Vedala held up her recorder, steadfastly maintaining a clinical tone in the face of this new horror. “The naturally forming latex from the rubber tree is disintegrating, consistent with infection by the AS-2 plastiphage variety—as witnessed when the seals failed on level five of the original Wildfire facility.”

Vedala stopped to take several steadying breaths.

“In addition, coagulation of the subject’s blood is consistent with an infection of the lethal AS-1 variety, which killed the victims in Piedmont, Arizona.”

She paused.

The cry of insects was loud against the silence. The group of scientists must have been feeling very alone in the jungle, aware of the thousands of miles between them and any hope of rescue or safety.

“This evidence confirms the existence of a novel mutation, with elements of AS-1 and AS-2,” continued Vedala. “There is a noticeable alteration of the subject’s flesh where it comes into contact with the latex sap. The two materials seem to be . . . combining. A hexagonal growth pattern of hardened gray particulate matter, possibly metallic, can be observed on both flesh and bark.”

Unfolding a geologist’s hand lens, similar to a jeweler’s loupe, Odhiambo studied the bark under magnification.