Thatcher pressed the crown to light his Indiglo wristwatch in the dimly lit passageway and used the glowing watch face to illuminate the hatch handle.
He pulled the handle and crept into the storage room where he had helped stow the aluminum cases. He removed his watch. Using its glowing blue face, he inspected the cases until he found the one with label streaks on the side.
He took the case, then slipped quietly down the passageway to the Trident’s broadcast control room in the starboard hull.
He tapped first on the door, to make sure no one was there. Hearing no response, he slipped inside.
The room was dark. The troll that inhabited it had finally gone to his quarters directly across the hall to sleep, and had left his banks of machines in sleep mode. Their red status lights flickered in the shadows like eyes.
Thatcher unlatched the aluminum case and poured out the contents of Pandora’s box.
Six dead-looking Henders rats tumbled onto the floor. Their legs immediately started twitching and clawing.
“Welcome aboard the S.S. Plague Ship, you little bastards,” Thatcher whispered. “Go forth and multiply.”
He closed the door quietly behind him. The passageway was empty and silent except for the thrum of the ship’s engines. He ran toward the stern.
A minute later, he was jumping into the large Zodiac that still trailed the Trident between the port and central pontoons. He took out a Leatherman tool from pocket number eleven and used its serrated knife to slice through the nylon towline.
The Zodiac slipped away on the Trident’s wake into the spring night.
“Survival of the fittest, Dr. Binswanger,” he murmured triumphantly at the ship as it motored forward into the gloom.
He pulled out the satphone he had taken from the Hummer, then fished out a GPS locator from another pocket in his vest. Gazing at the shrinking Trident on the dark sea, he punched a number into the satphone.
A grouchy voice answered after a few rings.
“Stapleton! I just knew you’d be up, old friend! What’s that? Well you’re up now. It’s Thatcher. Yes! I need help, mon frère! I had to abandon ship and I am currently on a raft in the South Pacific. Yes, I’m serious! You can’t imagine how serious! It’s a long story. Take down my GPS coordinates before I lose you: Latitude 46.09, 33.18 degrees south, Longitude 135.44, 44.59 degrees west. Send the Navy! I’ll fill you in on the details later! I need your help, my friend! OK, you have a pen? Latitude…”
The spring sun of the southern hemisphere warmed the cheeks of the sleeping Thatcher Redmond as it rose.
The satphone in his vest pocket rang, waking him up from a strange dream in which he was floating in a raft on the open ocean…
He sat upright at the stern of the big Zodiac and was astonished to see the vast broadside of the guided missile frigate U.S.S. Nicholas cutting into the sea beside him. Stapleton had come through! He had to think fast.
“Yes, hello!” Thatcher said into the phone. “I am Dr. Thatcher Redmond. I must have hit my head and fallen overboard last night into this raft,” he improvised, breathlessly. “Unless someone else struck me!”
“Is that the ship, sir?” came the voice, apparently from the giant ship.
Thatcher turned and saw the Trident on the horizon. He had expected the damn ship to be miles away by now.
“Yes, that’s it!” he said, thinking fast as probabilities shifted in his mind. “That ship is infested with dangerous animals illegally smuggled off Henders Island. I am an award-winning scientist, and I’m simply appalled that this sort of thing can go on and no one is doing anything about it!”
“Did you say animals are being smuggled on that vessel, sir?”
“Yes, yes! Dangerous animals! From Henders Island!”
There was a long silence as the raft rolled up and down on the ship’s wake.
Over the ship’s loudspeakers came an answer: “A RESCUE HELICOPTER FROM THE U.S.S. STOUT WILL COME FOR YOU WITHIN THE HOUR, SIR! JUST HANG TIGHT!”
The Navy frigate sliced through the water toward the Trident with alarms sounding.
As he propped himself against the stern to watch the U.S.S. Nicholas close in on the Trident, Thatcher sat back and repressed a smile. He reached into his pockets to see if he still had anything to snack on squirreled away.
The ship’s klaxon sounded, and all hands emerged groggily on the Trident’s foredeck. Three Navy ships bore down on the Trident from three points on the horizon.
Captain Sol’s voice reverberated over the intercom: “All hands on deck! The Navy is ordering us to abandon ship!”
Geoffrey and Nell ran to join Peach, Cynthea, Zero, Andy, Warburton, and Captain Sol on the bridge.
They heard the stern voice of a Navy officer on the radio now: “All passengers are ordered to abandon ship with nothing but their persons! The Trident will be scuttled. All passengers are ordered on deck now!”
The voice did not wait for an answer but continued to repeat its implacable demands.
“Tell him we need to speak to the President!” Nell cried.
Captain Sol cut in. “This is Trident. We have a special request and would like to appeal directly to the President—”
“Trident, you will comply with our demands immediately. Is that understood?”
“We’re screwed,” Zero muttered.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Geoffrey said. “We’re on a floating television studio!”
Cynthea looked tortured as she shook her head. “The Navy took away all our satellite transmission equipment after we lost Dante—”
“I still have a videophone,” Peach interrupted.
“Peach!” Cynthea gripped his shoulders.
Peach handed her a spare wireless headset from around his neck.
“You’re my hero!” Cynthea yelled.
“I know, boss.”
“Go get it, go set it up!” Cynthea shouted after him as Peach and Zero ran out the hatchway down the stairs.
Cynthea put on the headset and adjusted the mike.
“Set it up on the bow, Peach! Make sure to get the battleships in the frame,” she commanded through the headset. “We’ll make a human shield!”
She grabbed the satellite phone in the bridge and punched in a number. She winked at Nell as she said, “Hi, Judy, this is Cynthea Leeds. Put me through to Barry, sweetie!”
Captain Sol grimaced as the Navy ships grew rapidly on the horizon in the wide window of the bridge.
Peach and Zero tore down the passageway. Zero opened the hatch of the control room—only to see five Henders rats leaping straight at him.
Zero’s reflexes were barely fast enough to slam the hatch in time. A cold sweat washed over him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He looked at Peach with wide eyes.
Hender popped out of a hatch farther down the companion-way and Copepod jumped out behind him. Hender yawned, scratching his head and belly with four hands, and saw the two humans. Suddenly, he heard or smelled something that made him leap down the passageway on four legs toward them. Copepod stayed at his heel, snarling.
“Ooooooh,” Hender said, and he made a staccato call like a rising clarinet scale.
The other hendropods burst from their rooms and ran down the hall to join him, shooing the humans away.
The five hendros huddled around the hatch to the control room and then they rushed in one after another, banging the hatch closed behind them.
“Come on, Peach,” Cynthea urged over Peach’s headset.
“Um, there’s a delay, boss,” Peach said.
“There’s no time for delays!” she snarled.
Zero shook his head at Peach.
Peach winced. Then, ignoring Zero’s objections, he opened the control room hatch and ran in, slamming it shut behind him.
He grabbed the videophone, camera, laptop, and microphones while the hendropods, appearing and disappearing around him, fought off the rats launching viciously at him. One scratched Peach’s forehead with a raking claw arm but another hendro shot the rat through its arching center with a whirring obsidian disk. A few severed locks of hair revealed Peach’s brow, where a thin cut started bleeding. But Peach didn’t shout. He focused instead on the equipment he needed.
Peach lurched out the hatch with gear under his arms. Still inside, the hendropods slammed the hatch behind him, the bottom of his pant leg caught with two rat arms pierced through the jeans. He yelled and jerked his foot to rip free and the hatch opened for an instant as the rat was pulled back in before the hendros slammed the hatch shut again, freeing his leg.
“Come on!” Zero yelled.
“What about them?” Peach gestured at the hatch.
Copepod barked at the hatch, his body rigid as he jumped and clawed frantically at the door.
Andy came running in. “Where’s Hender?”
“In there,” Zero answered.
Andy reached for the hatch. But Zero stopped him.
“No,” he shouted, then turned and ran after Peach. “Get the hendros up here as fast as you can but don’t open that goddamned door, Andy!”
Thatcher munched trail-mix as he watched artillery shells prick white plumes off the Trident’s bow.
The Zodiac drifted into the wide foamy plain of the Nicholas’s wake. The salt was thick in the air as the billions of bubbles churned by the frigate’s propellers fizzed on the surface of the sea around him.
He squinted with grim satisfaction at each delayed concussion that rolled over the waves. He was betting that after the chaos subsided, anyone on the Trident would be lucky to be alive. Certainly none of them would be able to exonerate themselves even if they were. It was also extremely likely that the hendropods would be killed along with the rats when the ship was finally boarded by the Navy and they were discovered.
Thatcher knew his story was rock solid, that his reputation would win the battle of credibility, and that history would forever cast the others in shades of doubt, no matter the outcome. The odds were that he would gain even more stature before all was said and done simply by opposing them, even if by some miracle they did survive. He had, after all, witnessed them smuggling live, extremely dangerous specimens off Henders Island, in direct violation of a Presidential order, a crime tantamount to global terrorism. And the scene of the crime was about to be vaporized forever by a nuclear weapon.
He had been hoping that he would not have to call any attention to the Trident—the long shot he had pictured was the voracious rats taking over the ship, which would have eventually run aground or been boarded so that the rats would then start spreading at some port of call or random landing point. And the seeds of mankind’s destruction would have been planted, though too slowly to ever reach him in Costa Rica. What a show it would be to watch the Earth’s man-centric ecosystem collapsing across whole continents during the last twenty years of his life.
But he could settle for the crew and passengers of the Trident discredited as terrorists and quite possibly killed in a confrontation with the Navy; there was really no downside.
“Free will, Dr. Binswanger,” Thatcher goaded the younger scientist from afar, reciting the Redmond Principle, “can and will do anything.” He bit his lower lip as he realized that he wasn’t a fraud, after all, and the notion seized him with a paroxysm of laughter. After doing away with his own son, and now possibly an entire intelligent species, if not his own, he had categorically proven the Redmond Principle, all by himself.
The Navy ships continued to close on the Trident as another warning shot erupted off her starboard side.
“Hurry it up, Cynthea,” Captain Sol urged. Then, on the radio, he said, “We are complying! We are complying!”
“All hands on deck now, Captain!” came the response.
Cynthea still clung to the phone. “Barry, this is television history! No—it’s BIGGER THAN TELEVISION, sweetie! Come on! Say yes!”
As the crew gathered at the prow of the Trident, Zero and Peach set up the videophone equipment, looking over their shoulders at the two huge Navy ships bearing down port and starboard.
“Hender,” Andy shouted through the door of the control room. “We have to go!”
The Zodiac rolled over a series of high swells, as Thatcher watched the Navy ships closing in on the Trident.
He recognized the bottom of a jar of Planters cashews buried under some rubber fins and scuba gear. He dug it out and was disappointed when he twisted off the lid to see that there were only three left.
Cynthea furiously negotiated with the SeaLife producers on the phone and finally played her trump card: “We could all get KILLED, Barry—on LIVE television!”
Cynthea ran down the stairs from the bridge toward the bow, screaming, “OK, set it up! Set it up! We’re going live right now! Don’t ask! Where are they?”
The crew of the Trident was clustered on the prow, with the two ships looming in the background, perfectly framed. But no hendropods.
Running to the prow at full tilt, Cynthea stepped in front of the camera and played reporter. “What remains of the crew of the Trident is now being threatened by the United States Navy. Abandon ship or go down with the ship is their order. Why?” She looked in vain toward the companionway but saw no sign of the hendros as she vamped. “Because today we have saved a remarkable species from total destruction!”
Another shot exploded directly off the bow.
“We have to exit, Hender,” Andy shouted. “Go now! Now, now, now!”
Andy reached for the door handle and the hatch opened inward.
Hender looked out. “OK,” Hender said. “Hi Andy!”
Copepod barked in response.
Cynthea saw Andy run out on the foredeck. The five hendropods glided behind him.
The nearest Navy ship was now on top of them, slicing past their port side, its loudspeakers blaring out over the decks.
“YOU ARE ORDERED BY THE UNITED STATES NAVY TO ABANDON SHIP NOW. CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”
When the hendropods saw an arcing waterspout fired from a water canon on the deck of the destroyer, they whirled and ran in the other direction.
Andy caught Hender. “No, it’s OK, Hender! Come on!”
The hendropods turned around slowly at Hender’s humming and clicking calls. Then, reluctantly, they continued behind him and Andy toward the bow.
Behind them, one last Henders rat crouched in the hatchway through which they had come, rubbing its spikes together as it chose a target.
It bolted across the deck toward the hendropods just as they entered the frame of the videophone.
As the rat launched itself through the air, Copepod growled inches from Hender’s ankle.
Hender glanced at the ocean with one eye before casually batting the rat overboard with a deft block by its rear foot.
The rat thrashed in the water before sinking into the sea.
Nell, Geoffrey, Andy, Captain Sol, Warburton, Cynthea, Samir, Marcello, and the rest of the Trident’s crew gathered the hendro pods between them on the foredeck, creating a human shield as Cynthea had commanded.
With the combined stress of the moment and the sight of the gigantic ships moving through the sea around them, all of the hendros vanished.
All the major networks and cable news channels displayed on plasma screens in the White House Situation Room were muted.
The President and his advisors stared in astonishment at only one screen—the one that carried the live feed from the guided missile destroyer, U.S.S. Stout.
“Captain Bobrow, can you hear me?” the President asked the captain of the Stout.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me a closer view of the folks on deck, if you can, Captain.”
“Yes, sir. We’re getting you a closer view now.”
The image zoomed in as a camera on the decks of the Stout showed the Trident’s crew clustered at the bow.
“Isn’t that Nell?” the President said. “That’s Nell Duckworth, I believe, isn’t it, Trudy? I was told she died in an accident on the island. And there’s Dr. Binswanger.”
The others were impressed once more by the President’s Rolodex memory for names and faces.
“What’s going on here, Wallace? Lay off the shells, Captain Bobrow, damn it. I want you to stop firing, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, those are from the other guys.”
“Well, hey, you other guys, stop firing,” said the President.
“Yes, sir!”
“What is that…some kind of distortion?” the Defense Secretary asked.
“We need a closer look there, Captain Bobrow.”
“Yes, sir. We’re coming around.”
The Press Secretary suddenly cracked the door of the Situation Room and stuck his head in. “Mr. President! Turn to the Discovery Channel, sir!”
“What?”
The bullhorns sounded again from the nearest ship:
“ABANDON SHIP TRIDENT! CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON!”
“These are the amazing people of Henders Island,” Cynthea declaimed triumphantly into Peach’s microphone.
Marcello kissed his St. Christopher’s medal.
Cynthea gestured at the hendropods, but stopped, bewildered. They were gone. “What happened? Where are they?”
Sixty million people worldwide were watching TV when the live-feed from the Trident cut into their regularly scheduled programming.
Within two minutes, that number had leaped to over 200 million. The number continued to rise as the media feeding-frenzy accelerated through the swarm of satellites encircling the Earth in real-time.
The President listened to Cynthea Leeds speaking from the bow of the ship on the television. Whatever species of Henders organism the TV producer was referring to was nowhere to be seen.
“The President of the United States and the Navy are about to destroy not only us, but a new and intelligent species of people who have as much right to exist on this planet as we do! More, even!”
The loudspeakers of the Stout echoed over the deck in the background, “TRIDENT, YOU ARE IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF UNITED STATES NAVY DIRECTIVES. BEGIN ABANDONING SHIP IN THIRTY SECONDS, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”
“I don’t like it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense insisted. “Why are they not complying? Are they crazy?”
The Navy ship’s bullhorn rang out in the background.
“ABANDON SHIP NOW! COMPLY NOW!”
“And so the United States Navy continues its countdown to its sentence of execution,” Cynthea narrated.
There was an unbearable silence. The Trident crew looked at their watches and winced as the seconds ticked down. The Navy had stopped firing warning shots, but no one was sure if this was a good or bad thing.
Andy whispered in what he hoped was Hender’s ear. “Go on, Hender.”
Hender suddenly appeared in brilliant, rippling colors. “Hello, people!” he said in a fluting voice. “Thank you for saving us!”
All the hendropods blushed into vivid color beside him then and waved at the camera in Peach’s hand as they fluted together, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
“Well…what the…?” The President’s mouth hung open.
The astonished Commander-in-Chief glanced at his defense secretary and then back to the frightened people who stood defiantly on the bow of the Trident.
Half a billion people were watching the hendropods as the omnivorous eyes of humanity opened across the face of the Earth.
Some laughed at what they saw and thought it was a joke. Others scoffed and thought it was a fraud. Some recoiled and thought it was a horror, and others wept in awe and called it a miracle. Still others trembled with rage and believed it was the Apocalypse.
People watched in real time as their world was instantly turned upside-down. All who watched knew the human race had arrived at a moment of judgment that would mark its destiny and its character, and its world, forever, and the war over the meaning of that moment had already begun in living rooms, cafes, bars, and dormitories across five continents.
“Sweet Jesus H. fucking Christ,” the President said.
Behind the backs of the Trident’s crew, the camera showed the Navy bearing down as the second ship circled across their starboard bow, and a third ship appeared on the horizon.
Nell grabbed the mike from Cynthea. “Mr. President, if you are watching, you must spare these special beings!”
Admiring Nell’s chutzpah, Cynthea reclaimed the mike from her, whispering “Finally, a little drama, Nell. Good work, girl.” Then she shouted into the microphone, “So now we wait with the rest of the world to see what their fate and ours will be!”
Marcello watched the second hand of his watch as it crossed the 30-second mark, and he placed his hand on Hender’s arm as he closed his eyes.
Hender patted Marcello’s hand and Andy’s shoulder reassuringly as his eyes moved in separate directions.
Nell squeezed Geoffrey’s hand hard.
The destroyer’s bullhorns crackled, and a voice boomed over the decks: “THE PRESIDENT HAS ORDERED US TO STAND DOWN. WE ASK PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD.”
“Drama!” Cynthea exalted.
Then they all cheered, hugging each other across species as the U.S. Navy stood down.
Thatcher recognized the blue lid of a glass jar wedged between the bottom and the pontoon of the Zodiac. Another nut jar. Thank God, he was starving.
He tugged it, planted his feet on the pontoon. He pulled it out and twisted it open as he brought it close to peer inside.
Henders wasps and drill-worms spilled out of the jar onto his face and eyes. It was seconds before he realized it was one of Hender’s bug-jars that they had waved hours earlier to get the Trident’s attention.
Thatcher screamed and knocked the satphone overboard as the drill-worms punctured his eyelids and one of the raft’s air chambers simultaneously.
He writhed, tangled in lines and scuba gear, shrieking as the Zodiac partially deflated and one side folded around him. His panic slowly turned to shocked disbelief. Thatcher saw a burst of light as the worms corkscrewed into his optic nerves, and then there was darkness, and a while later there was no more.
All the way from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, the dull black B-2 stealth bomber cruised at Mach 2 at an altitude of twelve hundred feet over the South Pacific ocean.
“Look at that, Zack! The thing’s already breaking apart,” said the copilot.
As they approached the island they could see one of its walls collapsing into the ocean as they approached.
“Damn! OK, let’s lay this egg,” said the pilot.
Before the aircraft cleared the cliffs of Henders Island, the bomb bay doors opened and a B83 gravity bomb fell forward. A parachute deployed and like a two thousand pound lawn dart, the warhead plunged five thousand feet.
As the aircraft pulled up, the bomb’s hardened nose penetrated forty feet into the rocky core of the island. The reverberating clap of the missile’s impact with the stone heart of Henders Island drew rats, spigers, and swarms, which converged around the neat hole punched into the island’s bull’s eye. A 120-second delay began ticking down inside the bomb so that the pilots could achieve safe distance before its one-megaton nuclear warhead detonated.
“That’s gotta be the most expensive can of Raid in history,” the pilot remarked as they left the island at twenty miles a minute, covering nine miles in about thirty seconds. The boomerang-shaped B-2 banked in a wide circle as they gained altitude.
“Check it out, Zack,” the copilot said.
The two men looked over the expanse of the carbon-graphite composite wing as a brilliant light popped like a giant flashbulb in the bowl of the island.
A 250-foot deep crater a thousand feet wide was instantaneously excavated at the island’s center from the initial blast.
Within four seconds every living thing on the surface of the island was vaporized and the ashes blasted over the rim in a cone of smoke. Sand turned to glass. Rock flowed red-hot as a sun-like inferno filled the bowl.
The bomber pilots watched the eruption of light bloom on the island like a yellow rose.
“Don’t look at it too long,” the pilot warned. “Burns the retinas.”
“We’re past the nine-mile range…” the copilot said. “God, you can feel the heat of that thing from here!”
The intense light faded as a giant funnel of dense smoke rose out of the bowl three miles into the sky.
“We better stay ahead of the shockwave,” the pilot said, and he throttled up to just under the speed of sound.
“Target confirmed killed, Base. Copy?”
“Copy that. Mission accomplished. Come on home, boys.”