"Near as I can tell," Rook said, "your buddy is in a coma."
Queen checked Pierce's pulse, holding his wrist. Checked his eyes. Squeezed his hand hard, looking for a reaction to pain. Nothing. "The regens reacted to regeneration by losing their grasp on reality. They became animals… worse than animals. But this is something new. Still not perfected. His mind might be reacting by shutting down."
King listened. It made sense and he was glad Pierce wasn't awake to see himself like this. Still, on the off chance that people in comas really could hear the people around them, he leaned in close and said, "George. It's Jack. Listen. I'm going to take care of things. I'm going to figure out a way to help you. That's a promise."
"We've got trouble," Knight shouted back from the captain's chair. He pointed out toward the ocean. Debris clung to the waves. Body parts, too.
"They didn't make it," Rook said.
"Who?"
"The locals. A bunch launched out to sea."
King ground his teeth together. The submarine. Had to be. He punched the side of the boat and looked back at Tristan da Cunha. The island glowed bright orange like the devil had ascended from the thirteenth level of Hell and settled on the island. A great billow of smoke filled the sky above, blotting out the stars. Ash fell from the sky, the gentle flakes kissing their skin like warm snowflakes.
"Head inside," King said. "We don't need to be breathing this crap."
Rook took Pierce in his arms and carried him into the cabin and lay him down on a comfortable couch. Queen followed. King stepped up to Knight at the controls. "Set a course due north, then come inside. We'll take shifts out here. For now, let's see if we can raise the Grant on the radio inside."
Knight turned the wheel, looking at the compass, when he caught a flash of green in his periphery. The luxury yacht came complete with sonar. Something was rising next to them. Something big. "King…"
He saw it, ducked into the cabin and came back out with an RPG, ready to launch. Bishop, Rook, and Queen followed him out, similarly armed with a variety of explosive projectiles. He looked at the sonar screen, took aim at the ocean, and waited to fire. The submarine broke the surface one hundred yards away, rising like a breeching whale and crashing back into the water. A massive wave rolled out and away from the sub, pushing the Mercuryup at an odd angle, throwing off their aim.
The sub was easily recognizable as a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, but King had no way of knowing what kind of sub Manifold had got its hands on. He took aim again, as the Mercurysettled in the water. The others followed his lead. The sub approached slowly and stopped ten feet away. Too close to launch torpedoes and not sustain damage. The message was clear: We come in peace. But King maintained his vigil. The sub could easily ram them, letting its conning tower tear the Mercuryin two.
Only when the top hatch opened and two men in U.S. Navy uniforms stepped out, hands in the air, did King relax. The two sailors were followed by Captain Savile looking like a drowned cat.
He lowered the RPG staring at the captain, his mouth open in shock. He realized immediately what the captain's presence and physical appearance meant. Something awful had happened to the USS Grant.
"Get your people on board," Savile said to King.
"How many were lost?"
The side of Savile's mouth twitched for a moment. "Five hundred thirteen dead or lost so far. Maybe more. The Grant is wounded, listing, but not sunk. She'll make it."
"Those sons-a-bitches," Rook muttered.
"Get what you need," King said to the others, "and take George. I'll sink the Mercury."
"Hey, King," Savile said. "Yes, sir."
Savile looked at the glowing remnants of Tristan da Cunha. "Did you get them?"
King felt his stomach lurch as he heard the eager tone in the captain's voice. He wanted to know the bastards that sunk his boat and killed his men had paid for their crimes. But they hadn't. They'd escaped right out from under their noses. King let them go again. King's silence and cold eyes said what words couldn't.
Savile shook his head. "When you find the man who sank my ship, make him hurt."
King nodded. It went without saying. Manifold and Gen-Y had not only drawn first blood, but second blood, too. The only acceptable solution was to draw third blood… and much more of it.
THIRTY-EIGHT
A day after their failed mission, the team found themselves once again sitting in Limbo. They had been plucked from the ocean by helicopter, rendezvoused with a second aircraft carrier, and flown in the navigator's seats of five F/A-18 Super Hornets. The thumb drive data had been sent ahead to Aleman via satellite but only contained useless fragments of information.
Aside from retrieving Pierce, the mission had been a total failure and then some. A town had been destroyed. Two hundred seventy-one foreign civilians had perished, and while the proper authorities had been notified by a "passing vessel" of Tristan da Cunha's destruction, the world would never know it wasn't a volcano that killed all those people. After counting and recounting it turned out that six hundred seventy-two sailors had died in the attack. And the government's first CVNX-class, eleven-billion-dollar aircraft carrier and billions in aircraft had nearly been sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The military term FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition) didn't do the mission justice. If the whole mess hadn't been swept under the rug and buried deeper than the Mariana Trench, it would have gone down in history as the military's single most expensive mission, outside of a war, and would be recorded in history books for centuries to come.
On a personal level, the feud started by Bishop tossing Rook into the ocean had continued as neither man spoke to the other. A rift was growing on the team and that usually meant bad things. If someone didn't get injured as a result, someone would end up quitting. If they weren't reconciled by the mission's end, King would be forced to send one of them packing. The alternative was to risk all their lives. For now, the two would be separated. King spoke to Deep Blue in private, arranging the break.
On top of all that, Pierce showed no signs of coming out of the coma and still looked more like the Creature from the Black Lagoon than a human being. If that wasn't bad enough, the brightest minds in the U.S. government, from the CDC to folks who didn't officially exist at Area 51, couldn't make heads or tails of the skin and organ samples taken from Pierce. It seemed he was no longer fully human. He wasn't only not human, he wasn't like anything in recorded history. But King knew there was something similar. The artifact stolen from the Nazca dig site. It was real. Had to be. The Hydra. They'd somehow extracted and transferred its DNA to Pierce.
As King sat, waiting for Keasling to arrive, his anger at the situation built. He wanted to be reprimanded. Shouted at. Something. But it was business as usual. They'd underestimated their enemy. King. Keasling. Deep Blue. All of them. With such a big noose, it seemed no one would be hung. So long as the right people were caught in the end. Then the noose would belong to them.
Keasling entered and looked the team over as they sat around the table, sullen-faced and quiet. Even Rook remained silent. Aleman entered a moment later and took a seat at the table. He was straight-faced, but couldn't hide the tiny smirk at the sides of his mouth.