Plus, she was fine. Margaret wanted to pretend that she and Clarence were solid, but Tim sensed friction. A marriage cracking at the seams, if it hadn’t already shattered. Tim liked his women older, smart and powerfuclass="underline" Margaret was all three. He was helping save the world, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep the game afoot. Pursuing a sexy woman gave him an edge, helped distract him from worrying about the fact that he’d probably never leave this ship alive.
While that pansy Agent Otto got out of his suit, Tim made good use of the time.
“Okay, Doctor Montoya,” Tim said, “I’ve queued up the images of dead crawlers from Petrovsky and Walker. Ready for the side-by-side comparison?”
“I am. And please, call me Margaret.”
“Can I call you Red Hot Momma?”
“You may not,” she said. “The crawlers, please?”
Tim eye-tracked through his HUD menus, called up the prepared video, then grabbed and tossed it at Margaret so that both of their visor displays showed the same thing: a side-by-side progression of dead crawler images. Walker’s were on the left, Petrovsky’s on the right.
Margaret made a clucking sound with her tongue as she thought. “Walker’s crawlers, they’re in an odd state of decay. Almost like they were… melted.”
At first glance, the crawlers all looked similar to oversized nerve cells: each consisted of a large, roundish end with dendrites that extended, split, and split again like tree branches; a long, thin central body, or axon; and finally a tail end that spread out in thin axon terminals. Closer examination, however, revealed that the crawlers were actually made up of modified muscle cells that could reach, that could grab and then crawl toward the brain.
Tim had been far too busy to do any comparative analysis. Lives had been at stake. As he looked at the images side-by-side for the first time, he saw immediate differences.
“Walker’s aren’t decomposing the same way as Petrovsky’s,” he said. “Petrovsky’s crawlers have spreading clusters of black spots, starting small and expanding, like a banana that’s just starting to go bad. With Walker’s, the cell damage looks uniform, like something is affecting them all at once. You hit the nail on the head — they look like they’re melting. You didn’t see anything like that in your prior work?”
Margaret shook her head. “No, we didn’t. We studied Carmen Sanchez through the whole crawler-infection process. Nothing like this in him, or in Betty Jewell, and she was in an advanced state of the apoptosis chain reaction. This… this is new.”
She reached out, manipulating her images. Tim eye-tracked through his menu, altering his display so he saw exactly what she saw. Margaret had zoomed in on Walker’s crawler.
“Uniform damage,” she said quietly. “These crawlers started out alive, moving, then something made them start to dissolve.” She reached out again, wiped away the images from Petrovsky. Only Walker’s remained. “You said you also extracted live crawlers from Walker. Can I see them?”
Tim menued through to the video he’d recorded. “Let me get one on visual.”
The image came up. Still moving, still twitching, still reaching. He placed it side by side with the dead, melted crawler.
Margaret stared at the two images for a moment. “Walker’s crawlers are significantly different. I’ve never seen this form before.”
Tim felt his face flush with embarrassment that he hadn’t spotted it himself. Unlike all the other crawler images, this one didn’t have the spreading axon terminals at the tail end, just a long, thin body and the dendrite arms on what he presumed to be the top — and even that part was unusual. Where a normal crawler’s dendrite arms looked like a stubby tree with many branches, the living sample only had five arms of varying lengths.
Margaret’s eyes changed focus. Instead of seeing the images inside her visor, she looked through them to stare at Tim.
“Feely, why the hell didn’t you tell me they looked different?”
His face flushed deeper, but this time with anger. “I didn’t notice. There wasn’t time to do any in-depth work.”
She put her hands on her hips, a gesture that looked oddly out of place for someone wearing a bulky biosafety suit.
“Didn’t have time? Are you kidding me?”
Tim stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, Montoya, but there was a goddamn battle up top!”
Her hands slid off her hips. She looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to her that he could blow up at someone. Well, he had, and he couldn’t stop the volcano of frustration and grief that came blasting out.
“I did what I could,” he said. “There weren’t enough hands to go around. I had to make snap decisions. If I took too much time to save one man, three others would die.”
The ship’s doctors, overwhelmed. Bodies all over the deck. He’d been covered in blood… the smell of burned flesh, the screams, people begging for help… all the drugs in the world weren’t going to erase those two days. His anger faded. He saw the faces of men who had looked at him, looked right at him when he was already writing them off because they were too far gone.
And then there was Murray’s order to collect some crawlers and seal them up for shipment to Black Manitou. Tim had done that the day of the battle, grabbing a few samples from Petrovsky and sending them on. He knew he should have fought that order, but all he wanted to do was satisfy Murray’s request so he could get back to the wounded. Murray had sworn Tim to secrecy on that — Tim couldn’t tell anyone, and in truth, he was ashamed of caving in and didn’t want to tell anyone.
“I worked two days straight to save as many as I could. The only time I stopped was when Yasaka had two men drag me — literally drag me — down here to do some basic sample gathering on Walker and Petrovsky. And when I came down, I made sure not to touch the bodies, at all, just on the off chance I might bring contagion up with me when I returned to the wounded. I only used needles to gather samples, and I gathered those samples as quickly as I could. Know why? I had more important things to do than play with corpses. So no, Margaret, I didn’t pay that much attention to the motherfucking crawlers.”
Margaret sighed. She looked sad.
“I apologize,” she said. “I should know better. We have so little time to get this work done. I’m sure I’m missing things, and there are tests we should be running that just have to wait because we don’t have the resources. Everything is hurried, rushed, and you had it even worse with all the wounded. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
He could see she meant it. The sincerity of her response made his anger fade away as quickly as it had erupted.
Tim shrugged, feeling the bulk of his suit on his shoulders when he did.
“You’re really sorry?”
She nodded.
“Sorry enough for apology sex?”
“Not that sorry, no.”
“Oh well, worth a try.”
Margaret shook her head, a sad dismissal of his feeble attempt. She focused on the images in her HUD.
“These new crawlers from Walker… where exactly were they inside her body?”