Contagious

The chest triangle finally broke its fleshy tether, shooting upward on a geyser of blood that splashed against the ceiling.

Margaret heard the droning monotone of the EKG machine sounding out a flatline.

“Shut that f.u.c.king thing off,” Dew said.

Dan lowered the camera and quickly punched a b.u.t.ton on the panel. The flatline sound vanished, leaving only silence.

Margaret put her gloved hands against the transparent wall. Blood drops trickled down the inside of the gla.s.s, rolling toward the floor. They left little see-through streaks of red.

The three hatchlings tried to stand on weak tentacle-legs. They managed a few wobbly steps, filling the air with strange clicking sounds. Gradually they slowed. Their black, vertical eyes blinked slower and slower, heavy-lidded, sleepy, until they closed and the little creatures stopped moving.

Margaret rested her helmeted head against the gla.s.s. She checked the red clock on the far wall.

“Time of death, nine forty-four A.M.,” she said weakly. “I hope it was worth it, Dew. I really hope it’s worth it.”

Dew still hadn’t moved. He stared into the cell, stared at the body. “It’s not, Margaret. It never is.”

EYES ON THE PRIZE

It was only a matter of time now.

The Orbital had long since mapped all human satellites capable of detecting its presence. It had also identified a few ground-based observatories that might be able to see it. In all, the Orbital tracked eleven devices that could spot it, if only they looked in the right direction.

And now five of them were.

One was unfortunate, but not a cause for concern. Just random chance. Two was pus.h.i.+ng the boundaries of coincidence and meant it had possibly been spotted. As the day progressed, the Orbital saw a third, then a fourth, then a fifth device point its way.

There was no question: the humans knew.

It was only a matter of time before they attacked. The probability tables rated this at 100 percent. The same tables predicted a 74 percent chance that the first attack would destroy the Orbital.

It had some defenses, but it was small and designed for stealth and reliability, not combat. It could not fight an entire world.

The Orbital had prepared Chelsea as best it could. It would probably be up to her to finish the doorway. Chance of success? Incalculable—the Orbital simply did not have enough data.

The Orbital ran through the tables and arrived at the final entry in its extensive

A threat that had to be eliminated.

The Orbital began to modify its final probe.

PEEKABOO, WE SEE YOU

Gutierrez walked into the smaller Situation Room like a suit-wearing cage fighter rus.h.i.+ng to the ring, aggressive and excited to get it on. Tom Maskill and Vanessa Colburn trailed in his wake, the boxer’s entourage s.h.i.+ning with their own intense auras.

Ah, Murray thought, the energy of youth.

Gutierrez, Maskill and Colburn slid into their seats. Donald Martin and all the Joint Chiefs were already present. A full house once again.

Murray was thrilled that Vanessa had made it—he wanted her to see this.

“Okay, Murray,” Gutierrez said. “I just cut short a meeting with the Russian amba.s.sador about this Finland crisis to hear your urgent news, so let’s go.”

“Mister President,” Murray said, “Montoya’s weather theory panned out. We think we’ve located the source of the infection.”

Murray called up a map of the Midwest on the Situation Room’s big screen.

“This is the location of the first construct,” he said. A red dot appeared at Wahjamega, Michigan. “These blue dots represent approximate locations of the hosts seven days before we attacked that construct, and the green lines represent wind direction.”

Gutierrez studied the map briefly, then nodded. “And here is the same information for the hosts a.s.sociated with Mather, South Bloomingville, Glidden and g.a.y.l.o.r.d, Michigan.” As Murray spoke each city’s name, he added a yellow dot to the map. “This information provided enough data to triangulate a specific search zone.”

Murray tapped some more keys. The map zoomed in on a grid that included southwest Michigan, northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana. “But that’s still a huge area,” Gutierrez said.

“Yes sir,” Murray said. “But it helped us focus the hunt. It took our image-processing computers three days to identify visual anomalies, but by doing so, we found this...”

Murray clicked the keys again. The map vanished, replaced by a grainy photo of what looked like a translucent, teardrop-shaped rock pointed at both ends.

All of them, including Vanessa, sat back in their chairs. Murray felt like a conductor reaching the emotional apex of a symphony. The room filled with excitement and relief. They finally had a target; they could finally hit back.

“Son of a b.i.t.c.h,” Gutierrez said.

“NASA is convinced it’s artificial,” Murray said. “It’s very small, about the size of a beer keg.”

“How could we not have seen this?”

“There’s a lot here we don’t understand, sir,” Murray said. “The thing is stationary, hovering forty miles above South Bend, Indiana. The object seems to bend light around it—which makes it basically invisible, but the image a.n.a.lysts identified a visual fluctuation. They had to write a program that combined images from five different sources, then create this computer-generated model.”

“So this isn’t a real picture?”

“No sir,” Murray said. “They explained it to me with an a.n.a.logy. Imagine a contact lens dropped in a swimming pool. It’s not actually invisible, but if you don’t know the contact lens is there, you’re never going to see it. If I tell you to look in one corner at the shallow end, forget the rest of the pool, look for something that might stand out just a little, and you had a dozen people helping you, eventually you’d see the lens and figure out what it is. NASA doesn’t know how the thing can just hover there. It doesn’t drift. It should take a ton of energy to keep something stationary like that, yet it doesn’t give off an energy signature. That’s supposed to be impossible.”