The Andromeda Evolution Page 7

  * * *

  *** APPROVED STANDARD ISSUE MANIFEST—ALL TEAM ITEMS ***

  Tropical loadout as determined by Marine Corps Jungle Warfare Training Center (est. Okinawa, Japan). All items stowed in Umlindi all-weather backpack, Tarahumara attachment, chest-mounted heavy recon kit bag. ATTIRE to incl. standard-issue civilian jungle dress, USMC-approved boots, Merino blend socks x4, tactical wind shirt, rain gear. TOOL and TOOL ROLL to incl. machete, whistle, compass, flashlight, fire starter, multi-tool, all-purpose utensil, leather gloves, trowel. SLEEP SYSTEM to incl. hammock w/ bug screen and rain fly, mountain serape, cordage.

  Local guides to carry SURVIVAL KIT / COOKING KIT / TRAUMA KIT / WEAPONS KIT.

  *** APPROVED SPECIAL MANIFEST ***

  NIDHI VEDALA, MD-PHD

  Aerosolized cellulose-based Andromeda inhibitor, 200 oz. Based on subject’s Wildfire research and developed in cooperation with Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Delhi campus. (Protected by US top-secret classification and IIT Act in the Republic of India.) Contains no latex elements. Mimics the Andromeda nanostructure to remain invisible to known microparticle varieties (AS-1 & AS-2). Multiple interleaved layers are self-cleaning, providing a low-viscosity surface that repels liquid, dust, etc. Totally inert, indigestible, and requiring infrequent reapplication.

  HAROLD ODHIAMBO, PHD

  Projectile-tipped seismic sensor package, 16 count. Single-use deployment, locally networked and AI-enabled. Developed under Kenyan government research grant KIR-2300B and designed for detection of wildlife migration, geological activity, and criminal poaching. Fine-tunable for surface or subsurface events, with innate machine-learning capability for pattern recognition and noise cancellation. Additional specialty loadout, incl.: compact infrasound detector; soil moisture meter; portable core saw.

  PLA MAJOR PENG WU

  Chinese-made Dyclone-Wa portable field science and engineering kit—including packable light microscopy; portable autoclave; mass spectrum analyzer; gas and liquid chromatograph; pH meter; refractometer; microcentrifuge; wireless data logging and backup; satellite upload capability; twenty-seven built-in sensors and autosampler; and automatic sensor testing and calibration. Appropriate for field experimentation across multiple disciplines.

  JAMES STONE, PHD

  Palm-size “canary” self-charging mini-drones, 12 count. Charging base station integrated into portable backpack. Mounted with five-axis radial blade, four propellers with redundant, interchangeable parts. Sensor package: miniaturized laser rangefinder (submillimeter precision); low- and high-res camera imaging; gyroscopic inertial measurement unit; toxin-detecting environmental sensors (including AS-1 and AS-2 detection). Capable of concerted real-time map-building; collision avoidance; three-dimensional path-finding. No extra payload capacity.

  SERGEANT EDUARDO BRINK, US ARMY

 

  * * *

  Day 2

  Wildfire

  In a disaster . . . individual personality does not matter. Almost everything you do is going to make it worse.

  —MICHAEL CRICHTON

  Dawn Discovery

  ON WHAT WOULD BE THEIR FIRST AND ONLY NIGHT OF decent rest, the group of four scientists and twelve guides successfully camped beside the nameless river, sleeping in hammocks covered by mosquito netting. They were exhausted, despite having hiked for a mere six hours and covering fewer than ten miles. No problems were reported by Sergeant Brink in his official logbook or by Nidhi Vedala in her morning status notes.

  But something happened during the night.

  Upon reviewing the personal field diary of James Stone (a decidedly low-tech waterproof notebook and pen recovered after the incident), a paragraph stands out: “Slept fitfully. Woke from the dream, as usual. Thought I saw someone in dark but can’t be sure. Guides seem spooked. Caught Matis searching the tree line for something. Said nothing when asked about it.”

  In the aftermath of the incident, every surviving Matis scout blended untraceably back into the FUNAI-protected tribal villages and river shanties deep in Terra Indigena. Only one scout, Ixema, was eventually located, having spent his wages in a single day in the nearby gambling city of Leticia. He returned to where he had been contracted, looking for another payout. A sum was agreed upon, in exchange for information about the journey.

  Of the first night in the jungle, Ixema would say only one thing: “In the morning, something was wrong.” When pressed as to what exactly had happened, he admitted someone had left footprints around the camp. Several items were moved, but nothing had been taken.

  Finally, after much prodding, Ixema added one detail.

  Whoever had come in the night had also left something behind. Something Brink ordered the Matis to quickly remove from view, before the scientists could see it. Ixema described the head of a skinned monkey, brown eyes large and round in a skull covered in pink flesh, fangs bared in an agonized grimace.

  And its mouth, open as if screaming, was filled with gray ash.

  Twenty-Mile Perimeter

  THE FOUR SCIENTISTS AWOKE TO FIND THE MATIS already breaking camp. The smoking remnants of last night’s campfire had been doused, and the scouts were quietly divvying up the scientists’ heavy equipment. Without a word, two heavily tattooed Matis frontiersmen set off in single file into the trees, shotguns slung over their shoulders. Their pale, flashing machetes were quickly swallowed within the dim jungle.

  Watching them go, Vedala approached Sergeant Brink where he stood among the remaining scouts and porters.

  “Where are they going?” she asked.

  “Directly toward the anomaly. We follow in twenty minutes. Get your people packed and ready.”

  In response, Vedala walked to a waterproof hard-case lying on the slick mud of the jungle floor. She felt a sense of growing unease. The team was drawing nearer to the anomaly, and yet she had no idea what level of lethality to expect. Her only hope was that the inhibitor spray worked as well in practice as it did theoretically.

  Shaking off her unease, she cracked open the hard-case and retrieved several aerosol canisters. Passing a canister to Brink, she began spraying her arms, torso, and legs in short bursts, explaining: “This inhibitor solution protects any surface from contact with the Andromeda nanostructure. Apply it over your clothes and on your exposed skin. Give it to your men, too. Tell them to think of it as sunscreen. It should last a few days.”

  She closed her eyes and held her breath, spraying her face. Without a word, Brink headed over to his guides. Once he had moved away, Vedala opened her eyes and pulled out the government-issued Iridium satellite phone.

  Quietly, she tried to raise General Stern at Peterson AFB.

  Under the omnipresent tree canopy, the finicky phone didn’t register a single connection bar. Wary of wasting the batteries, Vedala gave up quickly. Further communication would be impossible until they found a break in the canopy. That likely wouldn’t happen until they reached the clearing beside the anomaly.

  Rendezvous with command was still set for noon on the following day, and until then, it appeared the team would be on its own.

  The two lead scouts had left behind an easy-to-follow trail of hacked plants—saplings and branches cut off at sharp angles, which looked oddly like spear points waiting to impale anyone who strayed from the path. Sergeant Brink and several of his Matis companions soon set off in single file, followed by the scientists, safely sandwiched between scouts in front and porters behind.

  The day’s march progressed largely without incident.

  Armed with detailed topographic map information collected by the Abutre-rei, Brink and his guides were able to lead the group around steep hills, avoiding sudden drop-offs and choosing to cross the many river tributaries at shallow points or where huge trees had fallen to create impromptu bridges.

  Though the path was twisting, the team made excellent time.

  The complex jungle environment proved to be
disorienting for the scientists. Peng Wu and Nidhi Vedala marched without speaking, frowns creasing their foreheads. James Stone walked behind them, sweating profusely, eyes wide and constantly scanning.

  Only Harold Odhiambo seemed to be perfectly at home, laughing and joking quietly with the Matis guides as he tromped through underbrush in his khaki shorts with his white tube socks rising out of muddy, well-used boots.

  Nothing gave the Kenyan scholar more satisfaction than sinking the teeth of his intellect into a new and exotic problem—and this one was unparalleled, given his interests. After years of wide-ranging studies, Odhiambo had devoted the twilight of his career to the geology of other worlds. Though seeing the utterly foreign architecture of the anomaly had frightened him deeply, it had also aroused his curiosity. Now he felt like a child again, riding in the back of his father’s ramshackle fishing boat—a thrilling experience, if not particularly safe.

  Stone was moving more cautiously. He wore a bulky metal-framed backpack swarmed by a dozen gently whirring canary drones. For now each small drone stayed within thirty yards or so, periodically returning to self-dock and rapidly recharge its batteries. The effect was that of a man carrying a thriving beehive on his back.

  The Matis guides were much amused by the birdlike devices, pointing and calling to them with uncannily realistic birdcalls of their own.

  Each of the nimble, hand-size quad-rotor drones carried an array of onboard sensors, as well as a chemical sensor package tailored to detect the signature of the AS-1 and AS-2 varieties. The toxin-detecting sensors continually scanned the air, and as the drones occasionally alighted on stable surfaces, a passive end effector could rasp surfaces to scratch off physical samples for testing.

  Cruising through dappled shadows cast by the tree canopy high above, the drones moved like phantom hummingbirds, slightly above eye level, exploring in a cone-shaped pattern out ahead of the group.

  A small flat-screen tablet computer hung over Stone’s chest by a lanyard. It displayed a crude drone-generated map, topographic, with the position of each flying robot identified and large objects marked as dots of varying diameters. In one corner, a grainy live video showed one drone’s camera feed. Despite the constant flow of information, Stone rarely stopped to check the screen. He was too afraid of losing the rest of his team in the thick foliage of the jungle.

  It was a claustrophobic experience for the scientists, who were unaccustomed to the sheer density of life concentrated in such a small area. On average hundreds of species of plant grow in every acre of the Amazon—a bewildering confusion to eyes used to seeing only a dozen or so species in North American forests.

  Soaring trees rose up around them, with roots stretched out like the tendons of extinct dinosaurs, and all of it crawling with vines, flowers, and creepers. Every inch of the jungle was alive with insects and birds and animals—biting ants making their tiny highways, rooting anteaters snuffling through the underbrush, and the flickering neon streaks of macaws winging through the air.

  This fecund crush of plant life all around and the spongelike soil beneath seemed to swallow up every sound. Staying close together became a priority for the field team. Even a conversation a few feet away was muted into muffled whispers, and none of the scientists relished the idea of getting lost and needing to blow on an emergency whistle until found.

  Marching along with one eye on the unreadable Matis guides, James Stone had begun to harbor suspicions. Entries in his recovered field diary indicated that, for one, he did not believe the team had permission to be on this land. He suspected that nobody, including the Brazilian government, had been notified of the existence of this expedition, much less its purpose.

  Thus Stone assumed that if they were to fail, it would likely be a case of disappearing into the jungle forever.

  More importantly, he had become increasingly worried about the behavior of their field guide, Eduardo Brink. Stone possessed an uncanny eye for details, a trait shared by his father. Briefly and quietly, Brink and the Matis had huddled together at various times for several worried discussions in an unintelligible pidgin of Portuguese and the native Panoan language.

  Brink never shared the content of these discussions.

  In one instance, Stone watched as a Matis pointed out an indentation on the path. Brink promptly stamped on it with a jungle boot. When Stone inspected the soil a few minutes later, he saw what could have been a naked human heel print. In another instance, Stone noticed several branches bent at about waist height along the path, as though a person had marked his or her trail through the jungle. Either the lead scouts had begun marking the path after hours of not doing so, or someone else had already been here.

  Finally, after hours of marching, Stone spotted a branch that had been laid across the path—insubstantial, but with a clear message: go no further.

  Stone was beginning to suspect that the team was under surveillance by an outside group. In any case, he was certain that Brink and his scouts were keeping secrets. Without proof, however, he wasn’t ready to make accusations.

  Not yet.

  And though his suspicions would turn out to be true, during the course of the day’s hike Stone would find them to be among the least of his worries.

  “DR. VEDALA! EVERYONE! I’ve got something!” shouted Stone, his voice thin and indistinct in the hanging curtains of vegetation. “Stop where you are, please. Make your way to me. Don’t stray from the path.”

  Moving single file, calling out to each other, the scientists slowed and stopped. Tired and muddy, the field team converged on Stone. The roboticist was breathing hard, holding up the small screen that hung around his neck. Sergeant Brink emerged from behind a tree and stood watching them. He was clearly irritated by the slowdown but said nothing.

  On the glowing display, a series of near-identical dots stretched out in a staggered line through the jungle a hundred yards ahead. None of the dots were directly on the path before them, but the scattered line crossed their position. With a finger swipe, Stone sent the canary drones on a wider reconnaissance pattern. More dots began to appear, an irregular line crossing deep into the jungle.

  “Look here,” said Stone. “These objects are all nearly the same size. Laid out in two rough lines.”

  Odhiambo examined the screen, tracing his rough fingers along the line of dots. In the corner, a thumbnail-size video feed showed a clump of something dark lying on the jungle floor. “Plants do not grow like that. In straight lines.”

  Stone stared down at the screen as more dots emerged. “Actually, they aren’t in lines. Not exactly. Look at how they curve. Whatever is out there is lying in two concentric arcs.”

  A shotgun blast rang out from farther ahead.

  The dull thump of noise faded quickly, but the jungle fell into an immediate, unnatural silence.

  “Stay here!” shouted Brink, jogging up the path alone. The team shared a worried glance, and then followed behind him. Stone brought up the rear, keeping an eye on his screen. In particular, he was watching for toxin alerts.

  Emerging at last from behind the exposed roots of a sprawling kapok tree, Stone stopped with the rest of the group and stared in disbelief.

  Ahead, he could see the dots were actually black, furry lumps—dead howler monkeys, a staggered line of them, unseeing eyes clouded, fangs bared. Beyond the howlers, Stone could make out a few woolly monkeys, covered in fine reddish fur.

  With a lot of cursing and gesturing, Brink was calling back the two Matis forward scouts, one of whom still had his shotgun out. The armed woodsman shrugged and replied in low tones as Brink angrily berated him.

  “What happened?” called Vedala.

  “He says he put one out of its misery,” said Brink.

  “Right. Keep your men back. We’re holding here until we can get a full sitrep,” ordered Vedala, just as Brink began to walk out toward the nearest primate corpse.

  “Stay with me, Sergeant,” added Vedala, firmly.

  The large man kept
walking a few steps, then thought better of it. Gesturing to the Matis to join him, Brink returned to lean against a tree. Unlatching the stubby battle rifle from his chest, he began to clean the barrel with a worn piece of rag.

  Vedala turned to the group of scientists, speaking with urgency. “Something killed these animals. We need to know what it was, right now.”

  James Stone had crouched on a tree root, his eyes fixed on the monitor hanging from his neck. With quick gestures, he directed the canaries to survey the field of corpses, the soft whir of their rotors the only sound in the still jungle.

  “Not picking up any airborne toxins,” he reported.

  Squinting into the shadowed jungle, Vedala studied the minefield of simian corpses stretched out before them. The Matis had gathered together, speaking urgently among themselves and not making any move to proceed. Peng had already retrieved her portable field laboratory. The device was half unpacked from a dirt-streaked hard-case. She was methodically ripping open the vacuum-sealed equipment from its Chinese-marked packaging.

  Staring into the wilderness with naked concern, Odhiambo began to ruminate out loud.

  “These primates are not the same. They are separated by species,” he said. His eyes rose to survey the canopy.

  “They fell. Moving through the trees. In two lines.”

  After conferring quickly with a Matis in both sign language and broken Spanish, Odhiambo turned back to the group.

  “He says the black ones move faster than the red ones. That must be why they made it farther. It also tells us the direction they were going.”

  “They were running from something,” concluded Vedala.

  “If the lines are concentric arcs,” added Peng, “it means they were all running from the same thing—a single point in the jungle.”

  “Our anomaly?” suggested Odhiambo.

  “We’ll see,” said Stone, tapping his screen. “I can use the radius of the arcs to estimate an origin point.”