Bridger got out of the shuttle first, and he saw a man standing on the small metallic dock. The man looked as if he hadn't slept in a week.
Bridger went up to him, as Terry got off and Ernst stumbled a bit, clambering out of the sub.
"Captain, thank you for coming." The man stuck out his hand. Bridger shook the man's hand. "I'm Station Chief Ralph MacInnis. I have my people..."
Bridger looked around. He saw two doors leading from the sub pool.
"...coming down here now and they're ready to get taken off the station."
"Whoa. Wait a minute. 'Taken off the station'? What are you talking about?"
MacInnis licked his lips. "You know what happened here—" His eyes were wild.
"I know you found something that the UEO is concerned about—"
MacInnis laughed, a nervous, demented sound. "No. You see—we told Harpe. I told him what happened. Harpe said he told the UEO about the accident. A sub crashed. And when we brought the people back in—"
MacInnis's eyes went back and forth, from Terry, to Bridger, to—
Ernst. And Ernst spoke.
"You brought them in here? You had the worms brought in here?"
MacInnis shook his head. "No. I mean, we didn't know they were in the sub... I mean—" He looked at Bridget almost apologetically. "We didn't know they were inside the people." He grinned. "Hiding, waiting."
Bridger looked away and whispered to Terry.
"This isn't good. I think we'd better—"
"Your samples, you have samples of the worms in your lab?" Ernst asked.
MacInnis nodded. "We have tissue samples there, the tests on the creatures' cells. But the lab is—"
Ernst started walking down the metal ramp to one of the doors.
"I know where the lab is."
Bridger yelled at him. "Ernst, where do you—"
Ernst stopped. "Captain. We have to get those samples and get out of here."
He turned and started running.
"I've got to follow him," Terry said. "Harpe can't get his hands—"
And then the other door opened, and people, the research station crew—all with the same terrified, wide-eyed stare that MacInnis wore—came into the sub bay.
MacInnis grabbed Bridger. "You have to get us out, Captain. Now!" MacInnis pulled out the gun and pressed it against Bridger's side. "So you tell everyone they can come on board."
Ford listened to the voice.
"Repeat, this is Dr. Laurence Petersen. We need to warn you that we have been imprisoned by the others on the station... They have attempted to keep us locked up in two wings of the station."
Ford looked at Bachmann. Cold, colder... wondering... What the hell's going on here?
"The others, the ones you are meeting, have been contaminated. They have been infiltrated by an opportunistic creature. Do not approach them. Come to the station's main sub pool. There are people here who need—"
Ford ran back to the command chair.
He hit a switch.
"Captain Bridger!" he yelled.
He waited a terrible millisecond for the seaQuest's captain to respond...
The smoky haze cleared, and—God—there they were, hundreds, maybe thousands of blackish holes, the burrows. And us the VR probe slowly, gingerly approached the burrows, Westphalen saw the worms stick their bodies out.
She saw the mouthlike opening at the end, the tiny rows of teeth.
They seem aware that I'm here, Westphalen thought.
Closer, and Westphalen remembered to check the recorder. A tiny red light blinked, indicating that what she was seeing was being recorded.
But this was more like being there, looking into those blackish holes, wondering how the creature established itself here.
Then she looked at the great chunk of volcanic rock, the cliff that was the moundlike home of the worms.
The probe floated closer to the burrows.
In full three-dimensional detail, the worms came out, then they slid back in, out and in, as if tasting the presence of the probe in the water, sensing it... feeling it.
One worm seemed to tilt at a funny angle—
And then—with Westphalen looking right at it—one worm leapt out of its burrow, its jagged-tooth mouth open, heading right toward the probe.
Rodriguez backed up. And he had this feeling that if he just went a step at a time, slowly, cautiously, it would all be okay.
Because then—he wouldn't be panicking. And as long as he didn't panic, everything would be... fine.
But then the sounds kept following him, surrounding him. With every step he took, there was this noise from the sides of the corridor, from above and around him, then passing him.
"What are they doing!" he screamed in the radio.
Marie's voice sounded so far away.
"I-I don't know. Maybe the readout is wrong. We're going down to the sub now, Julio. Come back—"
He was listening, backing up, when he heard a pop, and the clank of metal falling to the walkway.
Rodriguez held his gun tight. He turned around, slowly, again reminding himself, I mustn't panic...
He heard a grunt, and then he saw Dr. Laurence Petersen, the head of the geophysics team. And Petersen looked okay, sure—except for a bit of black grease on his cheek and a nasty cut under his neck—he looked okay... nothing wrong at all!
Petersen looked up and smiled at him.
"Oh, Julio, I didn't see you there..."
Petersen kept crawling out. Mustn't panic, Rodriguez told himself. Must keep my cool.
"Those shafts are so damn narrow." Petersen got to his feet. "Thought I might get stuck." The scientist grinned.
Got to shoot him, Rodriguez thought. It's not Petersen. Got to kill the thing before—
Petersen's smile seemed to widen, then the mouth was wide open and—
Rodriguez pulled the trigger.
Ernst ran down the corridor. The woman ran behind him, and Ernst wondered why the hell she was following him. What does she want with me? he thought.
He had the layout of the base memorized.
If they abandoned this base, there might never be another chance to get this material, to study this incredible life form. Or worse, he could see the UEO giving an order to destroy the whole site.
If that happened—it would be more than an extinction.
It would remove a life form that traced back to a time when the future of the planet was unclear, when life could have become something strange, alien...
Ernst reached a sliding door and hit the button to open it. He looked behind him and heard steps, the sound of the woman running.
He turned back to the door, opening so slowly, the door to the main lab of the Azores station...
Bridger didn't move.
"Tell them!" MacInnis yelled. And Bridger smelled the man's fear, the terror.
If the people from the station were to come on board the seaQuest—without being quarantined—they would release that terror on the surface.
"I can't do that," Bridger said. "Look—you don't know if any of your people have been infected."
MacInnis made the gun dig painfully into Bridger's side.
"They're fine—but they won't be fine if they stay in the station. The others are loose," he hissed in Bridger's ear. "They're loose, and we have to leave."
Bridger saw the station crew, the technicians, the research scientists, the dive teams—fifteen, twenty people lining up as though they were about to take a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan.
Bridger looked over to the opening to the sub.
Was this all being picked up by Ford? Did Ford have any bright ideas?
"I'm going to count to three, Captain."
Bridger wondered whether MacInnis had any experience with weapons. He was the station chief, a white-collar man—obviously more loyal to Harpe than the UEO.
Bridger played a dangerous game in his head, weighing the possibilities, wondering what would happen if he should make a move, if he should try to get away from MacInnis’s probing gun.
"One..."
Bridger thought he heard something in the hatch.
The radio at his side came to life.
"Captain, is everything okay there?"
It was Ford, and Bridger smiled at that. Gee—could things get any better?
"They can go in with or without your cooperation. Captain... Two..."
And we know what number comes next, eh, boys and girls? thought Bridger.
The people pressed close together on the metal ramp leading to the shuttle.
"Captain, what is your status down—?" Ford asked.
MacInnis opened his mouth. And then there was movement at the entrance hatch.
Bridger held his breath.
Westphalen watched the creature leap at the probe. For an instant it was caught in the glare of the high-intensity lights. She saw the creature's open mouth and watched the teeth move, back and forth, as though—
Westphalen recoiled in her chair...
As though there were muscles connected to the teeth, and they could move, grinding back and forth.
There was a painful exploding noise, and then there was nothing in the goggles. A dead screen.
The probe was destroyed, and Westphalen wanted to watch it all again, to see these terrible strange creatures again.
But now it was impossible.
Shimura had one eye on the monitor showing the research station while he checked the communication chip, making sure that it was in place behind Darwin's bulbous head.
"There we are," Shimura said. "Now you should—"
But Darwin kicked away. The dolphin swam back and forth crazily, and then there was a burst of static on the speaker.
Shimura thought that maybe there was something wrong with the communication device. Perhaps it had gotten damaged, though Bachmann said it was fine, that—
The static cleared, and Shimura heard Darwin's synthesized voice.
"There is danger...
Shimura watched the dolphin swim back and forth, kicking at the water.
"No, Darwin, there isn't any—"
But the creature jumped out of the water.
"There is danger. There is... death. Outside."
Shimura shook his head. What could the dolphin know? He'd been here the whole time.
Nothing. Unless...
Shimura stared at the dolphin, whose eyes were wild with fright.
Unless Darwin sensed something. Shimura came closer to the tank.
"What is it, Darwin? What do you know?"
"There is death. It's coming to Bridger... It's coming here..."
Shimura rubbed the head of the dolphin, and decided that he'd better tell Commander Ford.
Ortiz looked at the WSKRS data coming in from the three deployed satellite probes. And he noticed something odd...
The temperature, the ambient water temperature, was going up... slowly, but crawling steadily upward.
He hit a key that would set the seaQuest computer to interpreting what that could mean. Perhaps there might be a need to link up with the EarthNet computer—though the ship still seemed to have a problem connecting with the UEO.
Ortiz glanced up at the station, at the spindly shapes of the smokers, the vent field behind them... waiting for the computer to look at the WSKRS data.
Lucas spun around in his chair.
He looked around his room, but his eyes were focused on a point miles away, thinking, wondering...
There's something wrong with the message from the UEO. Noyce had ordered the seaQuest into the station, but it was as if it were a one-way message, as if there were no questioning whether or not it was the right thing to do.
It felt wrong, thought Lucas, and he decided to look at the tape again. And again, he saw the little blips, the interruptions, the odd gestures by Noyce...
Did somebody have a gun to the Admiral's head, Lucas thought.
He spun around in his chair, once, then again, spinning, thinking. He looked around his room, the image of the Admiral frozen on the screen...
Frozen... captured.
Lucas stopped spinning.
He stopped and looked at the face. He let the replay run a few seconds, watched the face move, the mouth shape some words.
"Wait a second," Lucas thought.
He had an idea. He dumped about ten seconds of the video image into his computer and then started searching it with a program used for analyzing topographic maps.
"Looking for fractals," he said to himself. "Looking for little subroutines in the video image..."
If this were pure video feed, the program should find nothing, the image pattern would be too random, the light bouncing erratically off every surface—the Admiral's skin, his desk—impossible to reduce to a pattern.
But as soon as the program started analyzing the video dump, a green icon came on the screen—signaling that fractals, routines, had been found in the video image.
"Too... much" Lucas said, and he hit a button and called up to the bridge.