Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Stone and Tupa launched themselves down the metal ladder and into the unknown. Older and slower, Odhiambo followed suit with surprising dexterity. Vedala was close behind, stopping only to scan for Peng.

She had stepped farther away.

The pillar of toxic dust was collapsing. It began to sweep across the room toward them. Peng’s gaze was still fixed on the exit.

“Don’t!” shouted Vedala.

Hands flat, Peng Wu launched herself into a sprint, legs slicing through knee-deep smoke. After a few lurching steps, her respirator slipped off her face and bounced around her neck. She continued accelerating in a beeline toward the tunnel exit, lips pursing as she tried to hold her breath.

“Damnit,” muttered Vedala. She stepped lower into the shaft, only her eyes above the floor now. Her fingers were clamped tightly around the cold metal ladder. A rolling tide of smoke was churning toward her. Odhiambo’s discarded light sticks glowed a bruised neon green within the black clouds, like ethereal lightning engulfed in a storm.

Peng tripped and fell.

Stumbling back up, she blindly groped her way forward. Then she collapsed into the blackness again, and disappeared.

Vedala took hold of the hatch over her head and paused another instant. She couldn’t take her eyes from the spot where Peng had fallen. Under the spinning LEDs of disoriented canaries, Vedala thought she had seen movement.

Then a terrible sight lurched into view.

Peng’s body reappeared, standing and falling again, then crawling. The infection had moved quickly, clearly penetrating her mucous membranes and propagating in her lungs. Incredibly, she took a choking breath, and managed to release a wailing scream of agony.

The tumbling wave of dust grew in Vedala’s vision, and she slammed the hatchway shut as the toxic cloud rolled over its top.

THOUGH STILL FUNCTIONING, the power plant had been turned into a shrieking storm of poisonous ash. Every inch of the room was choked with gritty black smoke. The subterranean power station was now an abyssal hell, echoing with the screaming of torn metal as the damaged turbine quaked and rocked. The faint lights of disoriented canary drones streaked through the air, their cameras still transmitting.

Below them, Peng Wu was alive.

She would have felt the Andromeda infection closing her airways, like sandpaper on the back of her throat, but she was still crawling. Her knees and forearms were leaving faint indentations in the softening floor, and her clothing had dissolved into her skin, seemingly painlessly. Peng looked very tired, and she seemed to want nothing more than to lay her face on the floor and drift away to sleep.

But a glimmer of light from above caught her attention. And just before she collapsed for the last time, Peng managed to turn over onto her back. She gazed upward, her hair already fusing into the anomaly in tendrils of black on black.

Overhead, a white light was shining in the storm of ash.

It grew closer and brighter. She could detect a faint thrumming sound, and a gentle hot wind blew over her face as the angelic beacon descended. At last she saw that it was a canary drone, encrusted with metallic growths and spinning off-balance. Twisting in the air, it plummeted down and landed right beside her face.

And in her final moments, Peng remembered her mission.

In a ragged voice, she turned her head and began to shout to the canary. She kept speaking as the infection closed up her throat and blocked her veins. She spoke as her body sank into the pillowy folds of the anomaly. Peng licked her metal-flecked lips, and she shared a last confession.

“The Andromeda Strain,” she rasped, “. . . it’s everywhere. Every planetary body. Mars. Moon rocks. Asteroids.”

Huddled safely in the sealed hatchway tunnel, the remaining field team listened to Stone’s monitor as it relayed this final message. In the darkness, nobody could see the tears leaking from Vedala’s eyes and tracing cool paths around her respirator. Stone kept an arm tight around Tupa’s bony shoulders. Odhiambo’s eyes were closed, head bowed as if he were praying.

“We covered it up, NASA, JAXA, CING,” said Peng, through clenched teeth. “Kline was right. Andromeda isn’t here by accident. It was sent . Waiting for life. And it’s been searching for such a long time . . . ”

State of Emergency

SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1998, THE INTERNATIONAL Space Station has existed as a symbol of peace and scientific cooperation between the world’s most powerful nations. Though these so-called superpowers often have conflicting interests, a sense of fellowship has prevailed among the many inhabitants of the ISS over the years. Astronauts form a common family, citizens of humanity working together above a shared world, men and women chosen from among the top scientists and pilots in the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, Korea, the European Union, and a dozen other countries.

That unspoken integrity—an ideal maintained for over two decades with unbroken ceremony and courtesy on board the ever-expanding space station—was about to be shattered.

Dr. Sophie Kline was declaring war.

The decision-making process that led to Kline’s next action has been much discussed. Most scholars have come to believe that the ISS was assembled in an era of relative naïveté, based on handshake agreements with no true safeguards. It is theorized that such an age of cooperation between superpowers will never again be possible, given the social, political, and intellectual climate that exists today.

Research and interviews, however, have led to a more optimistic conclusion.

What happened was most likely the work of a rogue scientist with unique traits. Kline’s rise to success was unlikely, to say the least, given her severe disability. It was those years of suffering that forged her into something almost superhuman—a person who simply could not be broken, or stopped.

At the heart of Kline’s indomitable spirit was a deep anger.

Kline despised the constant obstacles in her life—from the boundaries of her own body to the limits of scientific progress, and even the intellectual restraints erected by the scientific community to safeguard the human race.

Though laudable, her lifetime of achievements had not been spurred by a positive desire to open up new frontiers of knowledge. Rather, they were a sort of revenge. Kline had mastered the sciences quickly, violently, and with the express intent of putting them to use—the way one might break a horse in order to ride it.

Best estimates indicate that three years prior, Kline had become convinced that the Andromeda Strain was an attack on humanity. The tragedy is that Kline’s secret actions from that point on had gone unnoticed or unchallenged due to her prestige status as an American astronaut.

Compartmentalized knowledge is a mainstay of spycraft and necessary for any governmental information dissemination process. As a result of a lack of information transparency, however, Sophie Kline and Peng Wu were the only active members of the Project Wildfire field team who knew the truth about the Andromeda Strain.

The original AS-1 variety had been collected by the Scoop satellite missions from Earth’s upper atmosphere. Subsequently, the strain had been detected on every rocky body planet in the inner solar system. Traces of it had been recovered in 10 percent of regolith samples brought back by the Apollo trips to the moon.* And despite an unexplained landing failure of the return mechanism, the Stardust mission to Comet Wild 2 tested positive for the microparticle.

These instances had been humankind’s only sample-return missions, though other spacecraft had carried specialized instruments for remote detection.