Then what? Would they keep reproducing until there were billions? Trillions? Would the hydra population in his body expand until it overwhelmed him, until it started to damage him?
She had no way of knowing, other than to just watch Edmund.
What were the hydras? Were they friend? Foe? Or were they neither, just a parasite that used the human body? And if she dared to hope, what if they weren’t a parasite at all — what if they were symbiotic, something that could live inside the human body without harming it while at the same time protecting against the infection?
The hydras had kept Candice Walker from becoming one of the infected, from becoming converted, but that didn’t mean the new microorganisms were harmless, purely beneficial things. They found their way into the host’s brain — the human brain hadn’t exactly evolved with room for pa.s.sengers.
Charlie Petrovsky had finally been consumed by the black rot. Other than a pitted skeleton, there was nothing left of him to study. Complete liquefaction just three days after death.
Candice Walker, on the other hand, still showed no sign of the infection’s rapid decomposition.
Margaret eye-tracked through her HUD menus. She directed a microscope to lock onto one of the hydras in Edmund’s blood sample. Its waving tendrils reached out, blindly feeling for something to grab, to pull itself forward.
Walker’s stem cell therapy had introduced something new, something the Orbital hadn’t encountered before. Her infection had modified some of her normal stem cells, which probably produced the crawlers Margaret had seen so many times before. But some of the hacked stem cells must have had that artificial chromosome — was that what produced the hydras? A variant so different that it didn’t recognize the original crawlers as “self”?
The new hydra strain reproduced at a phenomenal rate, but so far didn’t seem to damage the host in any way. Walker had only had the hydras for three or four days, at most — there was no telling what might have happened had they continued to grow inside of her.
So many unknowns, but there was one fact that Margaret couldn’t deny: the hydras secreted a catalyst that killed off earlier strains of the infection — strains that damaged the human host, even killed it.
“You’re protecting your environment,” she said to the microscopic image on the HUD, as if it could hear her, as if it could think about her words. “Walker was your world … when she died, most of your kind died as well. You’re something new. You aren’t a means to the Orbital’s ends at all, are you?”
The hydra didn’t answer. It kept reaching, kept pulling.
Margaret felt her stomach churning. One too many of Tim’s Adderalls? The excitement at discovering a new form of life? Or was it that the hydras’ potential went way beyond Tim’s yeast? Walker’s pustules had contained hydras, hydras that might become an airborne contagion spreading from person to person, all across the globe, promising permanent immunity to the Orbital’s infection.
A different kind of pandemic.
Margaret shook her head. Too risky. Too many unknowns for something that had been created, after all, by the Orbital’s alien technology.
An alert popped up in her HUD: Tim Feely was calling her. She eye-tracked to the icon and connected. His face appeared in a small window in the upper-left corner of her visor.
“Margaret, I’m finished processing the samples taken from the three new victims. Can you join me in the a.n.a.lysis module? I think you better take a look.”
“On my way,” she said.
Tim’s face blinked out.
So little time …
SQUARE-JAWED MAN
Tim knew that if he made it out of this alive, he was changing careers. Janitor, maybe. At a grade school. Mopping floors, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning up puke — he’d be the happiest employee around.
Two doctorates. A lifetime of advanced learning. His work on Black Manitou had been a part of one of the most revolutionary projects in human history, and now here he was neck-deep in another. And where did all that put him? Right in the crosshairs of disaster.
“Tim? h.e.l.lo?”
His head snapped right, toward Margaret. Clarence was with her; he’d suited up for once, decided to join the party.
Margaret smiled at him. “Tim, you okay?”
He wasn’t. He never would be again.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He wanted to rub the crust from his eyes, but the G.o.dd.a.m.n suit meant he couldn’t touch them.
“Looks like our three new hosts give us a mixed bag of infections,” he said. “Brain biopsy shows crawler material in Nagy. He’s already converted, obviously. The samples from Chappas show signs of those dandelion seeds you doc.u.mented in Detroit, so it looks like he’s on his way to becoming a puffball.”
Margaret nodded slowly. “All right. And what about Austin?”
Conroy Austin, the boy who had cried right up until he’d been ga.s.sed.
“His body is changing on a scale unlike anything you doc.u.mented before,” Tim said. “Your earlier research showed the infection seems to concentrate on specific areas of the host’s body, so the altered stem cells are packed in tight. Like a supply chain — the closer the factories are together, the faster and easier it is to combine the parts, right?”
Margaret nodded.
Tim called up an image and shared it with both Margaret’s and Clarence’s headsets.
“The infection is. .h.i.tting Austin everywhere, and all at once. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It isn’t just rewriting his stem cells … it’s rewriting him.”