Sax had been in and out, supervising the work. He knew she’d seen the same things he had—she must have. But she’d kept her thoughts to herself.
Now he finished up on the microtome, placed it on a slide, sealed it, labeled it, and slotted it into the holder. It was the last one, and they were almost through—as long as Sax didn’t come back with yet another last-minute request.
“Hey, Barry, take a look at this.”
Frayne looked up and walked over to where one of his co-workers, Waingro, was standing over the main length of tentacle, getting ready to slide it back into cold storage. The thing lay coiled like a thin rope in its shallow tray.
“What’s up?”
“Look at it. It’s shorter.”
“Of course it’s shorter. We’ve been cutting off sections.”
“No,” said Waingro. “I mean, before the last break we took, I could swear it was longer.”
While they were talking, Reece, another lab assistant, came over and stared down.
Frayne turned to him. “What do you think? Is it shorter?”
Reece nodded. “Yup.”
“You…you think someone swiped a piece?” Frayne asked. He was alarmed. They had locked the lab when they left for their last break, but they hadn’t locked up the tentacle. They weren’t working in sterile conditions—that would have been an unacceptable impediment to the speed being demanded of them. They were taking their chances that the thing didn’t infect them with some exotic disease or pathogen. But that seemed highly unlikely, given how far from human biology the thing clearly was. Still, when they left the lab, they always locked it as a precaution.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Reece. “Make somebody a hell of a souvenir.”
Frayne felt a swell of irritation. “Let’s take it out and measure it. We’d better be sure.”
Still gowned up and wearing latex, the four unlocked the specimen tray and removed the thing. It was hard and stiff, like a piece of cable. They kept it under refrigeration, but it sure didn’t look like it would deteriorate or rot if kept at room temperature. It wasn’t edible to any earth-origin microbes. And coming up from four hundred atmospheres to one didn’t seem to have altered it at all. The thing was, essentially, weird as shit.
Working with care, they laid it out on the long, stainless worktable, which had built-in measuring marks.
“Six hundred eighty centimeters,” said Frayne. He pulled a clipboard down from the wall and scanned it. “It was originally eight hundred and nine.” He started adding up in his head the pieces they had removed; thirty centimeters for sectioning; forty for dissection; ten for biochemical assays; five for miscellaneous.
“We’re forty-four centimeters short,” he said. He looked around. “Did anyone forget to log a removal?”
No one had. And Frayne believed them: they were all careful workers. You didn’t get to be on a project like this if your lab work was sloppy.
“Looks like someone couldn’t be bothered to make a request through ordinary channels. Liberated a piece for themselves.”
“You think they just came in and cut off a piece?” asked Stahlweather, the fourth assistant.
“What else am I to think?”
“But the lab was locked during break.”
“So? Lot of people have keys. Especially the ones who think themselves important enough not to have to follow the rules.”
Heads nodded all around.
“I’ll have to put in a report about this to Sax and Glinn,” said Frayne. “They’re not going to be happy about it. And this happened on our watch.”
“Maybe Glinn did it.”
“Or that asshole Garza.”
More nods. This was a likely explanation. And it would deflect blame from them.
Frayne looked around. “Time to close up shop. The top brass won’t like the fact that somebody liberated a piece of that thing. But you know what? We followed procedure. And you guys put in a good day—well done.”
“Speaking of liberation…” Reece climbed onto a stool and reached up to the top of a cabinet, slipped his hand deep out of sight. Waingro was smiling knowingly.
Reece produced a gallon jug of red wine. “I think we owe it to ourselves to have a little party.”
Frayne stared. “What, with that rotgut?”
“And what if Sax comes back?” Stahlweather asked. “Now that we’re at the work site, it’s ix-nay on any drinking.”
“Come come, the speakeasy is open for business. Sax isn’t coming back—not tonight.” Reece’s smile grew broader. He reached up again to the hidden store and brought down a bottle of brandy, another of triple sec, and a bag of oranges and lemons. “Sangria, anyone?”
34
IT WAS BY now after dawn and Patrick Brambell was mightily relieved to be alone in his medical quarters, without Glinn or his assistant, Rogelio, breathing down his neck. He wanted to be alone, to think, to contemplate, to figure this thing out. He never could think clearly when there were other people around, and he was particularly relieved that he’d gotten rid of the shadowy presence of Glinn, lurking in the background like a specter. That, and the four workers in the adjoining exobiology lab, who—hours before—had grown as boisterous as a bloody frat party and he’d almost had to go tell them to pipe down.
In the silence, he got back to work.
In front of him, arranged with precision on the gurney, were the remains of Alexandra Lispenard. It was a singularly gruesome sight, much of it looking like coarse-ground hamburger mingled with mashed bits of flesh, shot through with shreds of clothing, strands of hair, and fragments of bone. Having arranged and rearranged just about every piece over the course of the last several hours, he had become thoroughly numbed and now gazed upon the scene not with horror but with scientific detachment.
The problem, he mused, was simple. If the crushed DSV was indeed a pellet—a shite—then the creature had to have absorbed some nourishment from it, the same way an owl ate a rodent whole, digested its flesh, and expelled the bones and fur. Nothing else made sense. The DSV seemed intact, nothing missing or dissolved, and besides it was hard to imagine the creature eating metal, glass, or plastic. It seemed much more likely it had digested or absorbed some of Lispenard.
He wondered exactly what that might be. It could have been her blood: naturally, the body was completely drained of blood, all five liters of it. But he remembered from the video of the recovery of Paul that there had been a faint cloud of blood trailing away from the crushed DSV when it was first discovered.
So the creature probably hadn’t absorbed the blood. It had washed away.
What he needed to do was weigh the body and see how much, if any, was missing. That could help him determine what had been absorbed.
He called up Lispenard’s chart on his computer and noted that her weight had been fifty-eight point eight kilograms. With the blood gone, that would lighten the remains by five kilograms, for a total weight of fifty-three point eight kilograms. The amount of wet clothing embedded in the remains, he calculated, was about one kilogram.
The gurney came with a built-in scale. He unlocked its weighing latch, activated the keypad, and waited while the digital screen ran through the kilograms.
It stopped at fifty-three point three kilograms.
So the body was missing about one and a half kilograms of weight. Some of that might be pieces they’d missed, or other liquids, such as lymph or bile, that had dispersed into the ocean. But some, if not most, of that liquid would have been replaced by salt water. Brambell was pretty sure he’d gotten every last piece of her. They’d been fanatical about it, and the pieces had sort of clung together in a stringy way, one leading to the next.
What part of the human body weighed one point five kilograms?