"So the kids don't get the disease,” O'Doyle said.
"Exactly. However, if those four children breed with each other, chances are much higher that your grandchild will receive two recessive genes. With a very small population, it works the same way. Sooner or later you start breeding with your direct relatives, and that increases the chances for inherited diseases to appear. That the defects in the rocktopi come from inbreeding, however, is only a theory. We can assume nothing with this unusual species."
The urge to sit and rest filled O'Doyle. His ribs throbbed loudly and his hands felt worse. Yet he couldn't rest — he had to plan their next move. They couldn't scale the cliff, and they couldn't stay. He knew the silverbugs might return at any moment, and shortly after them the rocktopi.
"Finish up professor,” O'Doyle said. “I'm sure you'd love to study this all day but we don't have the time.” He turned to look at Veronica. “Go talk to Connell. Maybe you can snap him out of it. We need him sharp if we're going to live."
Veronica stared for a moment, wide-eyed fear mixed with some internal rage, then nodded and walked over to Connell. O'Doyle wondered if she would snap. He'd seen people break under stress more times than he could remember. Each time someone wigged out it was different, and each time he could never say for certain what the “pre-wigging” signals were. It was just a thing you developed a knack for, a way of knowing who might become a liability, and who you could count on if you wanted to stay alive. He'd survived hundreds of missions — that knack was a key reason for his survival.
And that knack told him Veronica Reeves was damn close to the edge.
Veronica sat down next to Connell. She was glad to rest, even more glad to get away from Sanji's freakish little dissection class. She looked at Connell, whose head hung low as he stared at the powdery ground.
"You look like shit,” she said. Connell looked up at her with glassy eyes. His body sagged. His back leaned against the arcing limestone walls, legs flat and spread out before him. He held the H&K tightly against his chest, like a child holding a teddy bear against the night's shadowy demons.
Veronica unconsciously leaned toward him, her shoulder touching lightly against his. Her body ached for human contact. Some paltry reassurance she wouldn't die at the hands of a glowing, tentacled monster wriggling up from depths of hell.
"You sure know how to show a girl a good time."
Connell continued to stare straight ahead, fingers clutching the gun a little tighter, as if Veronica would snatch it away the second he let down his guard. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I've always been aces with the ladies.” They sat silently together.
"Why aren't you helping Sanji?” Connell asked, his eyes never breaking their glassy stare into nothingness. “I would think this is the find of a lifetime."
"It is… just not my lifetime.” Her entire professional career now seemed wasted. Somewhere inside she knew this discovery dwarfed anything any archeologist had ever found. Nothing compared to the discovery of another intelligent species.
She'd spent her life investigating a lost human culture, only to find that it was neither lost nor human. Did the rocktopi still exist in Cerro Chaltel? Were they waiting, a mile or two below the surface, waiting to attack anything that moved?
It all seemed so obvious now; twenty-twenty hindsight and Monday-morning quarterbacking. The caves, the depth, the heat, the lack of human remains — now it all seemed to crazily point to boneless aliens glowing with neon-bright intensity. This wasn't some lost tribe, pure and pristine in its primitiveness, it was an absurdity — an abomination. Something that didn't belong. And that was what she'd spent her adult life chasing.
"It's not what I hoped it would be,” Veronica said. “It's all wrong."
"Yeah, and this is everything I planned for,” Connell said with a snort, turning to glare at her. “I planned on being trapped in this hellhole, paranoid about robot spiders, petrified something will tear my suit so I'll cook to death, too afraid to sleep, killing these… these… things just to stay alive. Yeah, I'm happy with the way things turned out."
She stared back at him. The stubble on his chin made him look rough — handsome, perhaps. The blisters on his face were swollen and leaking pus. In some places the skin peeled away, leaving open, oozing sores. She shuddered as she realized her own face must look the same way.
She put her arm around him.
For a second he tensed up even further, perhaps to the point of shattering from his own rigidity, then his body seemed to deflate as if someone had pulled a plug and let all the stress flow down and out of his body. He sagged against Veronica, his head resting heavily on her shoulder. She reached up with her other hand and softly brushed the hair out of his face.
Mack's voice — loud and full of urgency — broke her reverie. “O'Doyle, we've got problems!"
She looked up at Mack, who knelt before the funnel mouth. Then she heard it — heard the sound that in a few hours had become synonymous with fear, with unknowing terror, with a horrid and inescapable death.
click click, click-click-click
Chapter Thirty
Kayla read the dial on the portable SIGINT unit.
She looked up and around, looking for any sign of movement, of strangely colored lights. The monsters had struck without warning — would they do so again? Her logical side told her she should be afraid of being out in the open, exposed; but her instincts said otherwise. Her instincts told her the monsters had attacked the camp — a very specific, targeted mission. The reality was that it didn't matter which side was right. If she wanted back in the NSA, she had no choice but to be out in the dark, hunting for that little prick's toys.
Kayla moved the unit slowly from left to right, the signal needle swinging to the red when she pointed at his hidden station. Kayla turned back again, making sure she had the direction correct, then walked forward.
That fucking little prick.
The phrase echoed over and over in her mind, usually followed by the word Angus. Kayla walked forward, slowly swinging the portable unit, closing in. Finally she found it. She stared in amazement, and more than a little embarrassment, at a metallic, pyramid-like device. The pyramid was a hodgepodge of equipment: a stainless-steel hydraulic piston that had already pounded a three-inch deep hole into the rocky ground; a trio of seismic sensors, one mounted at the base of each tripod-leg; a small, rubber-encased industrial computer; and a radio transmitter.
If he got a message out, if the police or rescue teams or — God forbid — the media found out about the mine and the monsters, well, then her plan went to hell in a handbasket. Everything hinged on secrecy, on André being the one who controlled the information. Any news coverage and she'd watch that leverage evaporate.