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Obviously, he’d been wrong. This s.h.i.+t was real. If the infection got out, it could literally end the world. Like it or not, he was smack-dab in the middle of it.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: he got to work with Margaret Montoya. The Margaret Montoya. She didn’t understand what a legend she had become in scientific circles. For reasons Tim couldn’t fathom, she seemed to be concerned with what regular people thought, people who knew nothing about science, nothing about how her genius had saved their uneducated a.s.ses.
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 powerful: 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 s.e.xy woman gave him an edge, helped distract him from worrying about the fact that he’d probably never leave this s.h.i.+p 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 cl.u.s.ters 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.