‘Exactly.’ Dad moved back into the tunnel. ‘So let’s see if we can find out what’s going on.’
But the second living area was as empty as the first, and Zak found himself hoping Mum and May had more luck. There was only the lab left for them to search on this side of the base, and every empty room they went into had him more and more certain something terrible had happened at Outpost Zero.
In the lab, Zak recognized some of the kit as better versions of the apparatus they had at school – Bunsen burners, beakers, tripods, microscopes – but the rest of it was stuff he’d never seen before. He had no idea what most of it was, but right at the back of the main room there were two sealed labs, and one them contained a large machine similar to the MRI scanner they used at the hospital to check out the inside of his head.
On every wall, there was a fire extinguisher; right next to more of those orange Nerf gun things he’d seen in The Hub. Zak put his hand on the one beside the door, wondering what it was for.
‘That’s an RCDS,’ Dad said. ‘Ranged Chemical Delivery System. Catchy name, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, totally. Not.’
Dad smiled. ‘That’s scientists for you. Invent something awesome and give it a rubbish name.’
‘You mean like “Spider Drones”?’
‘You don’t think it’s a good name for them?’
‘Dad, no one likes spiders.’
‘Maybe.’ He pointed at the RCDS. ‘Anyway, it’s a kind of rifle. Fire’s a big concern here, and it will be when they get to Mars – you can’t just call the fire brigade, right? So BioMesa came up with this idea to help out. It uses compressed air to fire small canisters that burst on contact. They’re filled with chemicals that extinguish the fire. Not much good for a big fire, but for something small, it’s perfect. We call it a Ranger for short.’ Dad turned to leave. ‘We’ll have a go later, how about that?’
‘OK.’ But as Zak was about to follow Dad back into the tunnel, he saw something that made him stop.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dad asked.
Zak ignored him and headed deeper into the room. He went to a bench by the far-left wall. ‘You need to see this.’
There were three bugs, each roughly the length of his little finger, lying on a white dissection board. One of the bugs was on its front. Its body was cone-shaped, and segmented as if it were wearing armour. It had a round head at the wider end, and something like a pincer at its tail end. To Zak, it looked like a cross between a scorpion and an earwig. Its armour plating was black, but when Zak tilted his head, he saw flickers of colour, like when a sheen of petrol shimmers on the surface of a puddle.
‘It’s like all those little bits we found everywhere,’ he whispered.
The segment immediately below the bug’s head was marked with two faint yellow circles. Wings, two on each side, were splayed out from beneath the armour plating, as if someone had pulled them out to display them.
Beside it was a similar bug, lying on its back. Someone had cut this one down the middle and removed whatever was inside the shell. Next to it, there was a fleshy, grey, caterpillar-like bug – except it wasn’t a caterpillar because it had six pairs of short legs.
‘What is it?’ Zak said. ‘Some kind of insect?’
Dad puffed his cheeks and blew out. ‘I don’t know much about insects, but I’m pretty sure they only have three sets of legs.’ He found a tablet computer lying beside the dissection board and switched it on. It lit up immediately, showing a document which had the words ‘Core Sample #31’ written at the top, followed by a long list of numbers and charts and tables.
Zak watched as Dad scrolled through it, his frown growing deeper and deeper.
‘What does it say?’
Dad tapped the screen. ‘I’m not sure. It looks like a lot of DNA information. Something about genomes and stem cells and—’ His attention switched from the tablet computer to the creatures on the board, to the tablet again. ‘— and a list of species.’
‘Species?’
‘Mmm. Mammals, reptiles, birds, fish… insects… everything, basically. I don’t understand, though, because according to this, all this information has come from Ice Core Thirty-One.’
‘Why is that weird?’
‘Well, firstly, no one here has been taking ice core samples – at least not as far as I know – and secondly, it’s impossible to have found all this DNA in one sample. You’d have to scour the planet to gather this kind of information. Take DNA from every animal you could find. It doesn’t make sense.’
Zak inspected the insects, or whatever they were, and shivered. ‘They give me the creeps.’
‘They’re even worse when they’re alive,’ Dad said.
‘What?’
‘These ones are alive. Come and look.’ Dad was heading towards a tall glass container at the far end of the long bench.
Zak wasn’t sure he wanted to see them, but they were behind glass. What harm could they do?
The glass container was like a tall fish tank, about two metres high and a metre wide. From where he was standing, Zak could see some of the black bugs, motionless at the bottom. As he went closer, the bugs began to move. Some crawled to the front, butting against the glass, and others spread their wings from beneath their armour and fluttered upwards to clatter against the top of the container.
‘There’s quite a few of them in here,’ Dad said. ‘I wonder where they came from.’
Inside the tank, the bugs grew more and more agitated, all of them now spreading their wings and scattering around the container in a swirl. Their armour battered against the glass, ting-ting-ting, in a bizarre rhythm. They moved faster and faster, becoming a blur of black that shimmered with hints of colour. And, right in the centre of the swirling swarm, two bright yellow streaks appeared. Zak had seen photos where people had used glow sticks to write words in the dark, and it was similar to what he was seeing now. Two fluorescent yellow spirals were rising and falling inside the glass container, twisting around one another.
‘What are they doing?’ Dad leant closer. ‘They making some kind of pattern?’
Zak took a step forward, and the movement stopped. In an instant, and as one, the bugs smacked against the glass and stuck there like a solid wall of insects. Zak caught a glimpse of the grey, fleshy creatures inside the armour before a sharp pain flooded through his head.
POW!
The lab disappeared. Dad, the bugs, everything.
Like before, Zak was hanging in the air, and when he looked down, he saw an endless sea of blackness, but now he knew it wasn’t a sea, but a hive of bugs stretching into eternity. And he knew if he fell into them, they would swarm over his body. They would smother him and he would drown in them as they ate him alive. In the seething darkness below, he saw the beginnings of a glowing yellow spiral. It turned and turned. Rising. Rising. A fluorescent double corkscrew reaching up and up towards him. He moved his arms, trying to float higher, to keep away from its reach, afraid of what it wanted, of what it would do.
‘Zak? Zak?’ Dad’s voice was reaching out to him in the darkness. ‘Zak?’
He turned towards the voice, feeling the comfort of its familiarity and POW! he was back in the lab, standing a few steps away from the glass container. Dad was frowning at him. ‘You OK?’
Zak glanced at the container where the insects had now settled at the bottom. ‘Yeah.’
‘You zoned out for a minute. Like before. You sure you’re OK?’
‘Creeped out by the bugs,’ he said.
‘Mm-hm. Me too. Come on, we should go find Mum and May.’
‘Yeah,’ Zak agreed. ‘Good plan.’ He cast one more glance at the container of bugs.