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“To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the Los Angeles’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”
Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.
“We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”
“Don’t look at the coc.o.o.n,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”
Clarence leaned in. “The what?”
“His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But … something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.
Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy s.h.i.+t. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re ma.s.sive — they look too d.a.m.n big for his head. And the ma.s.seter … it’s at least four times normal size.”
The man’s entire skull looked distorted, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.
Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”
“Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly bigger if he’s not ingesting ma.s.sive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”
“He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does … he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.
Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was absorbing the other?
“f.u.c.k this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”
Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently, did want to know.
“Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffb.a.l.l.s are for ma.s.s infection. What role would could this new thing play?”
Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”
Margaret sneered. “Then guess, G.o.ddamit. You’re the soldier, remember?”
Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word soldier it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.
Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said you got me there.
“Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the h.e.l.l out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they can’t build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”