Pandemic Page 50

All Margaret’s energy drained away. She felt hollow. The biosafety suit suddenly seemed so heavy. If she could just get out of it for a little bit, maybe rest her eyes.

She heard the click of someone coming onto her channel.

“Margo,” Clarence said. “Where are you?”

“Detainment.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m working, Clarence. What do you want?”

“The diver is going into the Los Angeles in forty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d want to watch.”

She did want to see that. Maybe the diver would come across the subject of Candice Walker’s final drawings, the three men in the membrane. Forty-five minutes … enough time to decon, get out of the suit, grab twenty minutes of sleep.

She turned to leave, felt Cantrell’s eyes upon her. For just a moment, she froze — he looked like he wanted to kill her — and then the moment was gone.

Cantrell walked to his bed and sat.

Margaret picked up her tray and left Edmund’s cell.

FOLLOW-THROUGH

When he’d been ten years old, Orin Nagy’s father finally showed him how to properly swing a baseball bat. It was all in the hips, his father had said. Twisting them at the right moment brought your body around, maximized your swing velocity. Arm strength mattered, sure, but the real power came from the hips. The hips, and following through.

The same advice held true for swinging a pipe wrench.

Orin swung, Orin twisted, bringing twenty pounds of unforgiving metal to bear on the motherf.u.c.ker that wanted to make him take the cellulose test.

The man’s biosafety suit offered little protection. The heavy wrench caved in his right temple like a hammer slammed into a ripe melon.

And, just like the good boy he’d once been, Orin followed through.

The man dropped like a bag of wet s.h.i.t.

Daddy would have been proud.

Orin heard men screaming angry things. He saw another one raising a pistol. Orin let the follow-through carry him all the way around in a fast 360-degree turn. As he came out of that turn, he swung again, more overhand axe-chop than smooth baseball swing. The results were much the same: the wet crunch of a crushed skull.

The gun went off. A pair of bodies slammed into Orin, dragged him to the ground.

He fought, because G.o.d commanded he do so, and also because before he died he wanted to kill just one more of the c.o.c.k-sucking p.i.s.sant humans that he hated so f.u.c.king much …

140 CHARACTERS

Six miles clear of the navy flotilla and fifty feet below the empty, roiling surface of Lake Michigan, the Platypus hovered, motionless save for the slight back-and-forth tug of the waves high above. It might have been a dead fish. It might have been a log.

A clamp released, freeing a fist-sized piece of plastic. The plastic floated upward, trailed by a thin cable. Forty feet … thirty … twenty …

The plastic reached the surface, bobbed there. It extended a telescoping antenna that was no thicker than a pencil at the base, little more than a stiff wire where it topped out four feet above the water.

The Platypus floated, unmoving, waiting for instructions.

A signal came in: a tweet. Then another. Five 140-character alphanumeric messages in all. Each message called up commands stored in the Platypus’s memory.

The Platypus retracted the antennae, then reeled in the plastic float. The machine tilted down, started to swim. A hundred feet down, then two hundred, then three hundred.

Ten feet from the bottom, the Platypus leveled out. It called up the recorded bearing that would lead it back to the Los Angeles. It followed the lake floor’s contour, going deeper and deeper as it closed the distance.

The Platypus scanned for any signal, any communication, ready to adjust its path based on the presence of other craft.

A half mile out, it detected pings from a powerful sonar almost a thousand feet above: signals from a surface ship sent to submerged vessels. The Platypus couldn’t read those messages — they were encrypted — but the signals themselves alerted it to a danger of detection.

Steve Stanton’s creation slowed to a crawl. It sank to the bottom, resting its underside on Lake Michigan’s thick muck. It used its side fins as arms rather than paddles, pressing against rocks and sand and mud to pull its body slowly forward.

It detected light, light coming from yellow shapes. The Platypus stopped moving, ran the visual data through pattern a.n.a.lysis programs. It quickly identified the shapes as U.S. Navy ROVs.

The Platypus shut down everything but its detection systems.

Eventually, the yellow shapes moved away, away and up, taking their light with them. When that light dropped below a certain level, the Platypus started a timing subroutine. If the light didn’t come back after four minutes, it would proceed.

Infrared cameras searched and found none of the moving objects it was programmed to avoid. Sonar continued to sweep the area, but the Platypus’s furry foam coating absorbed those signals, let almost nothing bounce away. What little echo escaped would show as nothing more than a fish.

The Platypus moved forward again, slinking across the bottom toward its goal.

So far, the machine had done nothing remarkable: Move toward an obstacle; search for un.o.bstructed s.p.a.ce; enter un.o.bstructed s.p.a.ce; repeat while moving toward the preprogrammed target location. To a robotics engineer, such maneuvers were child’s play, part of freshman robotics cla.s.ses — high school freshman cla.s.ses, that is.

The Platypus swam closer to the Los Angeles. Lined up next to the 362 feet of the wrecked sub, Steve Stanton’s 10-foot-long, narrow robot kind of did look like a fish. A tiny fish.