ZETA
Tane watched the chimpanzee, watching him. There were two chimpanzees, actually, but only one was watching him. The other was watching Rebecca. His was called Z2. At least that was what it said on the cage. Rebecca’s was Z1.
Z1 was the younger of the two, as far as Tane could tell, but he was no expert at guessing the age of chimpanzees. It was just the wise, almost serene expression in the eyes of Z2 and the way she sat, erectly, regally, with her hands clasped together in her lap. Hers was the face of a sad clown.
Z1 had a more mischievous expression. Impish, if you could call a chimpanzee “impish.” Perhaps that would make it “chimpish,” Tane thought.
The cages were set up near the center of what should have been the central restaurant of a fancy new hotel, the Hyatt Kingsgate in the seaside town of Orewa, except that the chairs and tables were stacked against the walls.
Not all the chairs and tables. The two chimpanzee cages rested heavily on the polished wooden surface of a couple of tables. Other tables were full of test tubes and petri dishes, being worked on by men in black space suits with open faceplates.
In the very center of the restaurant, three tables supported a long glass tank of some kind, covered with white tablecloths.
Rebecca and Tane sat quietly. The soldiers who had brought them here had not exactly encouraged talking, but Tane suspected that Rebecca would not have had a lot to say to him if it had been allowed. Nothing nice anyway.
They had been brought here half an hour ago. The troopers who had raided their house in West Harbor had brought them directly here, sat them down, and left them in the care of these other men, in the black space suits.
Where was Rebecca’s mum? he wondered. Had she been arrested also?
The troopers at the house had been New Zealanders. SAS, Tane guessed. But these were not. The murmured conversations all had an American burr to them. Anyway, he recognized the uniforms, the space suits. These were the men they had met on the island.
They waited, and watched the chimps. The chimps watched them back until eventually they tired of that and started watching each other and playing with the newspaper that lined the bottoms of their cages.
Eventually, a door opened and a tall man entered, talking into a mobile phone. Tane recognized him immediately. The leader of the soldiers: Dr. Anthony Crowe.
Two other soldiers entered behind Dr. Crowe. Between them they held the defiant shape of Harley Rawhiri Williams. Fatboy. His arms, like those of Tane and Rebecca, were fastened behind his back by a plastic tie, but his chin jutted staunchly. He walked with his usual swagger, and he still wore his hat. The scientist they had seen on the television, Dr. Lucy Southwell, followed.
Dr. Crowe pocketed his mobile phone and stopped in front of Rebecca and Tane. He opened his mouth to speak, but Fatboy spoke first.
“Sorry, guys,” he said.
Tane glanced involuntarily at Rebecca. Would she tell? Let Fatboy know what he had done? She didn’t get the chance.
“Found your voice at last,” Crowe said amicably. “That’s two more words than I’ve heard out of you the entire time I’ve known you. Sit down.”
He motioned to the other two soldiers, who sat Fatboy down next to Rebecca.
Crowe pulled up a chair, turned it backward, and straddled it, facing them, resting his arms on the chair back.
He pulled Rebecca’s notebook from a pocket on his leg and thumbed through it, frowning. Eventually, he closed it and put it back in his leg pocket.
He looked at them for a few moments, then said, with a glance at Southwell, “Cut them loose.”
An even taller man with a mop of curly hair and a Texan accent said, “You sure, Stony?”
Crowe nodded. “These kids aren’t terrorists. I’d stake my life on it. Him, I wasn’t sure about”—he jerked his head at Fatboy—“but these two, definitely not.”
The Texan produced a pair of cutters and motioned them to lean forward, so he could reach behind and cut the plastic ties.
“Just promise me you won’t go jumping overboard again,” Crowe said with something that approached a quick smile.
“Can’t promise anything,” Rebecca said.
“Well, if you must,” he sighed, “but we’re two stories up, and I think you’ll find the landing a bit harder this time.”
“How did you find us?” she asked.
“Fingerprints,” Crowe answered.
“From the air bottles?”
Fatboy said, “There was a roadblock at the end of the street. I didn’t even have time to call and warn you.”
Rebecca glared at Crowe. He picked at something in a tooth with his tongue and stared back at her. Southwell pulled up a chair and sat next to him. After a while, Crowe asked, “Who are you? And what were you doing on the island? Why were you at the research lab?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You have no idea what I would believe. Especially today. Especially here.”
Tane could see Rebecca thinking. He wondered if she would tell the full truth. They might not believe all of it. Which would make them not believe any of it.
Rebecca must have thought the same, because she just said, “We were trying to stop the Chimera Project.”
“Why?”
Why! He hadn’t said what, Tane realized. So he knew about the Chimera Project.
“Because we believed that bad things would come of it, if it was allowed to proceed. That there might be a man-made disaster.”
“Do you think this is that man-made disaster?” Crowe asked, waving a hand toward the north.
“Do you?”
He pursed his lips a moment before answering. “I think we have a bunch of bioterrorists loose with some new weapon. What that has to do with Professor Green, I couldn’t say. So tell me why you were so worried about the project. Tell me how you knew about the project.”
“We met Professor Green on the island a few weeks earlier,” Rebecca said truthfully, then lied, “She told us all about it.”
Crowe considered that for a few moments.
“Do you believe them?” Southwell asked.
Crowe looked around. “It fits the facts. The fact that they arrived on the island after everyone had disappeared.”
He turned back to Rebecca. “I sure would like to know how a bunch of kids could afford that dinky little submarine, though.”
“We won the Lotto,” Rebecca said evenly. “Where’s the sub now?”
Southwell answered, “It’s safe. Don’t worry about it. We towed it to the naval base at Devonport.”
Crowe said, “So you won the lottery and decided to spend your winnings on a submarine, then used it to sneak onto an island and try to break into a genetics lab?”
“Yes. That pretty much sums it up.”
“And the cryptic messages in the notebook?”
“Our plans. We wrote them in code in case the notebook got lost.”
Good call, Tane thought. The cryptic messages would look like code to an outsider.
“And I’m sure there’s a very glib explanation for the strange transmitter in the aluminum briefcase.”
“Sure,” Rebecca said easily. “We were going to connect it to a mast at the Skytower. It uses gamma rays, which transmit through water. It lets us connect to the Internet, even when we are submerged.” She smiled. “Check our e-mail, you know.”
It almost seemed believable.
Crowe thought it over. “Gamma rays, huh?” He seemed uncertain. “There are some holes in what you’re telling me. Some damn big holes. But overall, I’ll buy it.”
He took out the notebook and handed it to her. “Seems we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Stony Crowe, from the U.S. Army Bioterrorism Response Force.”
“Rebecca Richards.” She took the book tentatively, as if there might be a trap of some kind in it.
“Harley Williams,” Fatboy said.
“Tane Williams,” Tane said in turn.
Lucy Southwell introduced herself.
“Well, seeing as you know so much about the Chimera Project,” Crowe said, “perhaps you could enlighten us a little. We’ve been through Professor Green’s notes, but there’s nothing to indicate any kind of a problem or how it could be used by terrorists.”
Tane started to protest that they knew absolutely nothing about the Chimera Project, but Rebecca shot him a warning glance. An icy-cold warning glance.
“Happy to help,” she said.
“Did Professor Green mention anything to you about macroscopic pathogens or bacterial clusters?”
She hadn’t. Tane had never heard of either. Rebecca evidently had, though, as she said, “That’s impossible.”
“So you are familiar with the concept, the theory, of macroscopic pathogens.”
“No,” Rebecca said, as if it were a stupid question, “but I know what a pathogen is, and I know what macroscopic means. But that’s impossible. Surely!”
Tane had no idea what macroscopic meant. He tried to work it out.
Crowe said, “Just because something is beyond the realm of what we already know doesn’t make it impossible. You’d better come and look at this.”
He stood and led them toward the long glass tank, still covered, in the center of the room.
They stood around the tank as he reached out and pulled off the cover in a single movement. The tank was filled with thick, impenetrable fog. Thick rubber gloves were embedded into the sides of the tank at intervals down its sides.
“You got a sample of the mist,” Rebecca said. “Have you analyzed it?”
“Mmmm.” Crowe seemed distracted. “Inconclusive results as yet. But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”
Tane looked deeply into the mist. Was there something moving around in there?
“What, then?” Rebecca asked.
“This.”
Crowe placed one hand on the side of the glass tank, then tapped the glass with his free hand. There was a low whistling noise from within the tank, and suddenly, from out of the mist, a shape materialized, flying at high speed toward the palm of his hand. Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy jumped, and even Crowe flinched involuntarily as the shape slammed into the side of the tank. He withdrew his hand.
“What the hell is that?” Fatboy asked. Tane just stared, openmouthed.
“We call them jellyfish,” Crowe said. “They seem to be attracted by vibrations. Either movement or sound.”
Tane could see where the name had come from, although this creature was far smaller than any jellyfish he had ever seen in the ocean. It was about the size of a large bumblebee, a bulbous shape made of a gelatinous, translucent material. The main body seemed to be in three parts, forming a Y shape, with a mass of thin fibrous tentacles trailing underneath.
“You caught that in the fog?” Rebecca asked.
Crowe shook his head. “Nope. We just sucked up a sample of the fog and released it into this tank, to help us study it. There were no jellyfish in it then.”
“Then how…?”
“They just formed, out of the mist. Little dense patches at first that gradually got bigger.”
“Holy crap,” said Fatboy.
Rebecca said incredulously, “You’re not trying to tell me that that is a macroscopic pathogen.”
“What on earth is a macroscopic pathogen?” Tane asked.
Crowe looked appraisingly at him. “A pathogen is an organism that attacks another larger organism. Like bacteria or a virus attacks the human body. All the pathogens we know of are microscopic. Too small to be seen with the naked eye.”
Southwell added, “Macroscopic means large enough to be seen without a microscope.”
Rebecca scoffed, “You’re not trying to tell me that this creature is some kind of giant virus!”
Crowe almost smiled, just a brief twitch at the corners of his mouth. “A giant virus? No. Viruses are subcellular. Smaller than a human cell. They have to be. They crawl into cells to attack them. No, not a giant virus.”
The small jellyfish-like creature drifted slowly away from the wall of the tank, losing definition gradually in the mist.
Crowe continued, “I attended a lecture a few years ago. At Oxford. A Doctor Hans Heinrich was the lecturer, a highly respected immunologist. He hypothesized the existence of macroscopic pathogens. Not viruses, but bacterial clusters.”
He paused and looked around the little group. “Bacteria are single-celled organisms. But if you grow a whole lot of them together, then they form a colony, or cluster together, in what we call a biofilm. And a bacterial cluster can show characteristics quite different from those of a single bacteria. They exchange chemical signals between cells, and the cluster itself can grow into a quite specific shape. We see wave patterns, towers, and other structures. Dr. Heinrich suggested the existence of bacterial clusters that behaved as a single organism. Perhaps as large as a grain of salt. Thousands of individual bacteria, acting in concert. A single macroscopic pathogen. Invading the body, then overwhelming its defenses by the sheer volume of the bacterial cells released. To the best of our knowledge, that is what we have here.”
Fatboy mumbled, “It’s a bit bigger than a grain of salt.”
Rebecca said, “You’re not trying to tell us that these terrorists, these ‘snowmen’ in the fog, have developed bacterial clusters that are trained to attack humans.”
Crowe shook his head. “They’re not ‘trained’ to attack humans any more than a cold virus is ‘trained’ to attack us. It’s just what they are. It’s what they do. But we can’t find any reference to bacterial clusters, or anything even remotely connected to it, anywhere in Green’s journals. That is where I was hoping you might have a little more inside knowledge.”
One of the other soldiers approached and said quietly, although for little purpose, as they could still hear every word, “We are ready for the test now, Doctor.”
“Then get on with it,” Crowe said.
“Z1 or Z2?”
Crowe shrugged. “Whichever.”
“They are living creatures. Why do you call them by numbers?” Rebecca asked. “Why not give them names?”
“They’re not pets,” Crowe replied curtly. “Pets have names. These are lab animals.”
The Texan opened one of the animal cages and the older-looking chimp, Z2, jumped out with a squeal of delight and began tousling the tall man’s hair.
He smiled and Tane laughed.
“She’s got character.” Rebecca smiled. “I’ll name her for you.” She thought for a moment. “Z-two, zeto…”
“Zeta,” supplied Tane.
Rebecca looked at him for a moment, before accepting it.
“Zeta,” she said. “Hi, Zeta!”
Zeta looked over at her and held out a hand as if she would like to jump onto Rebecca, but the Texan held the animal firmly.
Crowe did not find it funny. “They’re not pets,” he repeated.
“Makes it harder to stick electrodes in their brains and vivisect them, doesn’t it,” Rebecca said with a little-girl innocence completely at odds with her words. “How about the other one, Z-one?”
“Xena,” suggested Tane.
“Zeta and Xena,” Rebecca declared. “And what little test have we got lined up for you today, Zeta?” She held out a hand to Zeta, who patted it and looked up at her with big, sad clown eyes.
“We’re going to put her in the tank,” Crowe said flatly, to Rebecca’s look of horror.
The end of the tank was a separate box, sealed off from the rest of the tank by a glass door with thick rubber seals.
They let Zeta climb in the box, which she did willingly, trustingly, and then sealed the lid above her. In the main compartment of the tank, there were whistling, swishing noises as the jellyfish, agitated, swept around in circles in the mist.
Zeta jumped a little and turned around and around inside the small area, but otherwise didn’t seem too concerned about being shut in a glass box.
“You can’t!” Rebecca said, again and again. “You can’t put her in the tank with that thing!”
Southwell, looking quite uncomfortable, tried to explain. “She’ll give us very valuable data. Chimps are our closest cousins.”
Manderson contributed, “Genetically, they are ninety-nine percent the same as humans.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Rebecca muttered, but the insult went straight over Manderson’s curly head.
Crowe said, “We need to know what these pathogens can do to us.”
“And you need to sacrifice an innocent animal to find out?”
“It’s just one chimp,” Crowe said with a look of annoyance. “Fifty thousand human beings got ‘sacrificed’ in Whangarei. And there’ll be more if we can’t figure out what is going on.”
With a nod from Crowe, Manderson released the seals and Zeta’s compartment flooded with the fog.
“No!” shrieked Rebecca. She pressed her fingers against the glass by Zeta’s head. Zeta looked at her and gave her a big clown smile. The other USABRF men gathered around to watch.
Zeta seemed bemused by the fog at first, as it started to fill her chamber, then a little confused as it thickened around her. The jellyfish whistled around in the thick of the fog, avoiding the thin vapor at the other end.
“They can’t exist outside of the fog,” Crowe murmured, watching intently. “They can’t move, they can’t live. It’s their nutrition and their locomotion.”
One jellyfish flashed down the side of the tank near them. By now the fog had spread evenly between the two partitions. The jellyfish whirled around Zeta, then disappeared back into the fog.
That was all. Nothing else happened.
After a while, Zeta went for a walk. Tane held his breath and could hear from the sharp intake of air from Rebecca that she was doing the same.
Zeta wandered through the main tank, comically trying to wave the fog away from in front of her eyes. She found one of the jellyfish, drifting at about her eye level, and Tane winced as she stretched out a hand toward it.
The jellyfish remained motionless. She even batted at it with her hand, swatting it like a fly, but without effect.
“It’s not interested in her,” Southwell said with a puzzled look.
“Okay, that’s long enough,” Crowe said.
“Go, Zeta!” Rebecca yelled in a mixture of delight and relief, hopping from one leg to the other and punching the air. “You go, girl!”
Zeta screeched and danced happily inside the cage, a little two-legged, two-armed Irish jig. Tane and Fatboy laughed, but Crowe just shook his head.
They reversed the procedure with the small compartment at the end of the tank, sealing off the main section before pumping in air and extracting the fog.
“Are you going to let her out?” Rebecca asked.
“She may be contaminated,” Crowe replied, then, a little too quickly, said, “Dr. Southwell, would you show them the journals?”
Southwell led them to the far side of the room, where a series of notebooks were spread out on a table.
“Professor Green’s notes,” she said. “Do you know much about what they were researching?”
“Tell me,” Rebecca said. “Vicky told us it was rhinoviruses.”
“Actually, it was rhinoviruses they were researching. They did a small amount of work on NLVs, but only for a short time, to confirm some aspect of their main research. They were researching conserved antigens. That’s common structures within the viruses that can—”
“She told us about that too,” Rebecca interrupted. “How much do you know about the Chimera Project?”
Southwell said, “Conserved antigens proved to be elusive. Our immune systems just kept getting fooled by the changing shapes of the viruses. It was a dead end.”
“So?”
“Professor Green recently gained health department approval to experiment on the other side of the equation.”
“The human side of the equation?”
“Yes. They were playing around with bone marrow, where antibodies are produced, genetically engineering our immune systems to try to produce a generic antibody.”
“An antibody that would recognize any kind of virus.”
“Any kind of rhinovirus. That was the field they were concentrating on.”
“And how,” Rebecca asked, a little skeptically, “do you start to create a generic antibody?”
“The scope of the project approval was quite specific. They were genetically splicing together different kinds of antibodies, creating a…” She trailed off, seemingly unwilling to finish the sentence.
“A chimera.” Rebecca finished it for her. “Is that it? Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Southwell shook her head. “Nothing. Professor Green had not yet submitted a report on the results of the research. All we have is her notes.” She indicated the table again. “Would you mind having a look through? Tell us if anything sticks out.”
“Of course,” Rebecca said, and picked up the first journal.
Tane idly leafed through one. Rebecca was the only one with a hope of understanding them, but it was interesting to see the clearly handwritten notes, dates, and formulas that the late Professor Green had written. Vicky’s handwriting was small, neat and verbose, flowing on, page after page. Tane idly wondered why she hadn’t just typed up her notes on a computer.
Fatboy was the first to notice, glancing across at the other side of the room. “What are they doing?” he wondered.
Tane looked across, and Rebecca also. Two of the men had their hands in the gloves in the sides of the compartment. One was holding Zeta while the other ran a needle into her arm.
Zeta didn’t like it; she screeched and snarled at the men.
“They’ll be taking a blood sample,” Rebecca said. “To see if the fog had any effect on her.”
She looked back at the journal she was reading, only to look up again a second later to check on Zeta.
The man with the syringe had withdrawn it, but it was empty. With a frown, Rebecca walked across the room to the tank. Zeta looked sadly, imploringly, at her from inside the glass.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You’re taking a blood sample, right?”
Crowe was there now. “Miss Richards, this is our work. I’d like you to let us get on with it.”
“That was a blood sample, right?”
Inside the tank, Zeta began to shiver. She sat down suddenly and looked up at Rebecca like a frightened child. The top lip of her clownish mouth drew up into a sneer.
Southwell put her arm around Rebecca’s shoulders and tried to steer her away. She shook the arm away violently.
“What have you done to her?”
Zeta slumped against the side of the tank, her eyes open. Her breathing was ragged, heavy. She looked up at Rebecca one last time; then her eyes just glazed over and remained open. Her chest was still.
Crowe took Rebecca’s arm this time, firmly, and drew her away from the tank.
Rebecca cried, “You killed her! What are you going to do, dissect her to see if the fog has affected her?”
Crowe said nothing.
“You are! You monsters!”
“Monsters?” Crowe hissed, the stony façade cracking for the first time. “Monsters!” He grabbed Rebecca by the back of the neck and pressed her face against the glass of the large tank. There was a whistle and a flash of white fog, and two of the jellyfish smashed into the glass, just a few thin fractions of an inch away from her eyes and mouth. She screamed. Tane jumped forward, and Fatboy was with him, but strong arms gripped their elbows, pinning them.
“There are your monsters! We don’t have time to wait and see how the animal is feeling in a month or so. We have just a few days before the fog hits Auckland. We need answers right now!”
“Murderer!” Rebecca whispered, sobbing, her lips crushed against the glass.
Manderson reached in with the rubber gloves and laid the body of the chimpanzee flat on the floor of the tank. In death, Zeta had found peace once again. The forced sneer was gone, and her face held its natural sad-clown expression.
Crowe looked at Rebecca with stony eyes. “I told you not to give it a name,” he said.