Part 43 (1/2)

'Your son is safe,' said de l'Orme. 'At least from the disease.'

'Who controls the release of the contagion?' Vera asked Cooper. 'You?'

Cooper snorted.

'Montgomery Shoat,' guessed Thomas. 'But how? Are the capsules programmed to release automatically? Is there a remote control? A code? How does it happen?'

'You mean how can you stop it?'

'For G.o.d's sake, tell them,' Eva said to her husband.

'It can't be stopped,' Cooper said, 'That's the whole truth. Montgomery coded the trigger device himself. He's the only one who knows what the electronic sequence is. It's a mutual safeguard. This way his mission can't be compromised by anyone. Not you,' he said to Thomas, then added bitterly, 'and not an indiscreet son. And we, in our haste, can't trigger the virus before he determines the time is ripe.'

'Then we have to find him,' said Vera. 'Give us your map. Show us where the cylinders have been placed.'

'This?' Cooper slapped at the map. 'It's merely a projection. Only the people on the expedition know where they've been. Even if you could find him, I doubt Montgomery remembers where he placed the capsules along a ten-thousand-mile path.'

'How many are there?'

'Several hundred. We mean to be thorough.'

'And trigger devices?'

'Just the one.'

Thomas studied Cooper's face.

'What is your calendar for genocide? When does Shoat mean to start the plague?'

'I told you. When he decides the time is ripe. Naturally, he'll need the expedition's services for as long as possible. They provide him transportation, food, company, protection. He's not suicidal. He's not a kamikaze. He insisted on being vaccinated. He has a strong sense of survival. And ambition. I'm sure, when the time comes, he won't hesitate to finish the job.'

'Even if it means killing off the expedition. Your people. And every human colonist and miner and soldier down there.'

Cooper did not answer.

'What have you made our son into?' Eva said.

Cooper looked at her. 'Your son,' he said.

'Monster,' she whispered back.

Just then, Vera said, 'Look.'

She was staring at the video screen. The hadal had reached the piled sewer pipes. He was pulling himself upright before the dark, round openings. The video screen showed him forty feet tall. His bare rib cage, scored with old wounds and ritual markings; bucked in quick, pumping waves. The creature was vocalizing, that much was evident.

Sandwell went over and rotated the round b.u.t.ton on the wall. The audio feed came over the speakers. It sounded like the hooting and huffing of a captured ape.

A face had appeared at the mouth of one sewer pipe. Then other faces surfaced at other openings. Crusted and wet with their own filth, they came out from their cement burrows and fell upon the ground at the hadal's feet. There were only nine or ten of them left.

The hadal's voice changed. He was singing now, or praying. Beseeching or offering. To his own image, of all things. To the video screen. The others, women and their young, began to ululate.

'What's he doing?'

Still singing, the hadal took a child from one of the females and cradled it in his arms. He made a sacramental motion, as if tracing ashes on its head or throat, it was hard to see. Then he set the child aside and took another that was held up to him and repeated his gesture. 'He's cutting their throats,' January realized.

'What!'

'Is that a knife?'

'Gla.s.s,' said Foley.

'Where did he get gla.s.s?' Cooper roared at the general.

An emaciated female stood before the butcher hadal. She cast her head back and opened her arms wide and it took her killer a minute to find the artery and saw her throat open. A second female stood.

Voice by voice, their song was dying.

'Stop him,' Cooper shouted at Sandwell. 'The b.a.s.t.a.r.d's killing off my pack.'

But it was too late.

Love is duty. He took in the crook of his arm his own son, as cold as a pebble. He cried out the name of the messiah. Weeping, he made the cut and held his final child while it bled down his breast. At last he was free to join his own blood with theirs.

BOOK III: GRACE.

21 - MAROONED.

Inter Babiloniam et Jerusalem nulla pax est sed guerra continua...

Between Babylon and Jerusalem there is no peace, but continual war...

-ST BERNARD, The Sermons The sea, 6,000 fathoms No one had ever dreamed such a place.

The geologists had spoken about ancient paleo-oceans buried beneath the continents, but only as hypothetical explanations for the earth's wandering poles and gravity anomalies. The paleo-oceans were mathematical fancies. This was real.

Abruptly - on October 22 - it was there, motionless, calm. Men and women who had been racing downriver for their lives stopped. They climbed from their rafts and joined comrades standing agape upon the pewter-colored sand. The water spread before them, an enormous flat crescent. The slightest of waves licked at the sh.o.r.e. The surface was smooth. Their lights skimmed from it.

They had no idea the shape or size of the water body. They sent their laser beams pulsing upward, searching for a ceiling that finally measured a half-mile overhead. As for the length of the sea, the surface bent. All they could say with certainty was that the horizon lay twenty miles distant, with no obstructions in between and no end in sight.

The path split right and left around the sea. No one knew which led where. 'There's Walker's footprints,' someone said, and they followed them.

Farther down the beach, they found their fourth cache. Side by side, the three cylinders lay as neat as merchandise. Walker's men had reached the site hours earlier and stockpiled the contents within a makes.h.i.+ft firebase. Sand had been heaped into a circular berm with entrenching shovels. Machine guns were trained on fields of fire.

The scientists approached on foot. One of the mercenaries came out and put a hand up. 'That's close enough,' he said.

'But it's us,' a woman said.

Walker appeared. 'The depot is off limits,' he informed them.