Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (40 page)

“It must have infiltrated the
SvalSat station,” Halvorsen explained after they’d all introduced
themselves, “I suspect as the helicopter pilot that transported the
shift crews. The thing impersonated one of my men after killing
him, then blew up the station.” He was silent for a long moment.
“First the Russians shot us down, then that thing killed the rest
of my men.”

“I don’t think it was the Russians,”
Jack told him. “There were four of these things, masquerading as
Russian troops. I’ll bet they’re the ones who shot down your
plane.”

“About that,”
someone said quietly from behind them, just outside the entrance,
causing everyone to spin around, raising their weapons, “you would
be correct.” The man stepped forward, looking calmly at the rifle
muzzles pointed in his direction. “I am
Kapitan
Sergei Mikhailov of the
Russian Army,” he said in excellent English. “These
svolochi
,” he said,
nodding at the nightmare forms on the ground, “shot down your
plane. They also destroyed ours, and killed most of my men when
they blew up the airport terminal.” He looked at Halvorsen. “We did
not come here to fight you. We were ordered to protect the seed
vault from terrorist attack.”

“You blocked the runway with your
bloody plane!” Halvorsen shouted.

Mikhailov nodded.
“Yes, because we were lied to by…
them
.” He was still in denial about
the biological impossibility that smoldered on the floor, and the
other one that looked like a smashed cockroach that the Americans
had dragged up the tunnel. “When we saw you come in here after
this...thing, we could have killed you. We did not.” He looked at
Jack and Naomi. “What are these...creatures?”

“That’s a long story,” Jack
breathed, worried now that it wouldn’t be long before the locals
started showing up, and probably more planes from Russia and
Norway. He and his team needed to be gone long before then. “We’ll
tell you what we know, but first we have to figure out how to
destroy everything in the vault. These sons of bitches contaminated
the seeds.”

“That, I think,” Mikhailov said, “is
something we can help with.”

Fifteen minutes later, they all
stood around the entrance, watching as the burly Russian NCO,
Rudenko, happily pumped nearly three thousand gallons of Jet-A fuel
down the tunnel.

“My lady?” Mikhailov said, extending
a signal flare to Naomi while Rudenko pulled the tank truck away to
a safe distance. “Would you prefer the honors?”

Numbly, she nodded
and took the flare. Lighting it, she stared down the fuel-drenched
tunnel before throwing the flare in as far as she could. With a
loud
whump
, the
fuel ignited, and in a few seconds was burning so hot that the
metal entrance doors began to warp on their
hinges.

“Come on,” Jack told her, pulling
her away and shielding her from the intense heat of the flames that
were now roaring out of the entrance, “let’s get the hell out of
here.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Back at the base in California,
something stirred in the biosafety containment chamber that had
once held a rhesus monkey infected with the harvester retrovirus.
The monkey was no more. Every cell of its body had been converted
to a new use, given a new purpose. To feed. To grow.

The organism had no thought, no
awareness, only a biological imperative to seek out what it needed
to satiate its raging hunger. It was guided neither by sight, nor
sound, nor smell, but by receptors on the surface of its body that
were able to sense and sample on a molecular level all that they
touched.

This new life, risen from the old,
had no shape, no specific form. It moved by flowing, and was able
to cling to any surface it touched.

Spreading tendrils from its central
mass, it probed its immediate surroundings. It found the food
dispenser the monkey had used, and its body swarmed over it,
secreting powerful enzymes that rapidly reduced the fruit and
vegetable slices into molecules it could easily absorb.

The creature’s tendrils pushed
farther up the enclosure, encountering the thick rubber seals that
kept the enclosure airtight. There were seals around the hatch and
seals around the other penetrations into the chamber, all rich with
rubber...and carbon.

It rapidly consumed the rubber, its
digestive enzymes quickly dissolving it, breaking down the chemical
compounds into what it needed. Then it oozed through the gaps left
where the rubber had been, making its way farther into the innards
of the chamber. There, it fed on the housings for the medical
sensors and camera, the analysis equipment, and the other
components that contained carbon. It left behind as excreta those
elements it didn’t need for growth, by squeezing a dark mass of
viscous liquid from its body.

In the course of its feast, as it
continued to probe and digest the carbon-rich components of the
chamber, it ate its way to freedom.

***

Vlad had spent the hours since the
team had left for Spitsbergen helping the other scientists on the
team prepare another batch of seeds to go into the vaults that had
been built into the old missile silos. It was tedious work, but had
to be done. Everything depended on it, and he relied on that for
his motivation when he would rather have been at his
microscope.

With that necessary chore done, he
was finally able to return his attention to the biopsy samples he
had taken from the strange lesions that had appeared on the rhesus
monkey. A part of him felt guilty at having had to do that, for he
loved animals. But he knew it was a necessary evil: they had to
know what the retrovirus did, and the only way they would be able
to find out was to see it in action. He only hoped the effects
wouldn’t cause the monkey much pain.

He sat down at his workstation and
called up the results for the series of tests he had programmed the
biosafety chamber to carry out on the tissue samples from the
monkey.

While the results were being loaded,
he took a quick scan of the monkey’s blood work, which had been run
every hour using the intravenous shunt in the monkey’s arm. He saw
that the white cell count had increased gradually in the beginning,
with a spike about three hours ago, followed by a rapid drop to
nearly zero. Frowning, he looked at the results for the other major
blood components, all of which showed gradual changes during the
first hours after the animal had been infected, then major spikes
or drops three hours ago before falling off to near-zero. The only
exception was the red blood cell count, which gradually tapered off
to zero half an hour ago, when the test monitor reported an error
because the flow of new blood for sampling had
terminated.

“The needle must have come out,”
Vlad murmured to himself as he tried to make sense of the readings.
What he was seeing should be impossible: the monkey should have
been dead long before the red cell count reached zero. There
wouldn’t have been enough red cells left to transport oxygen from
the lungs to the rest of the body.

Oddly enough, aside from an initial
fever about an hour after the monkey had been infected, its body
temperature had remained nearly constant. Even now, it was half a
degree above normal.

Then he saw the respiration and
heart rate data, and sat back in his chair in shock: the monkey had
stopped breathing about the same time as the spikes in its blood
work three hours ago, and its pulse had declined along with the red
cell count until that, too, had stopped about ten minutes
ago.

“
Yob’ tvoyu
,” he cursed under his breath, snatching his smart phone from
his belt. It should have sounded an alarm when any of the monkey’s
vital signs had passed certain thresholds. Pressing the button to
activate it, it gave him a brief “low battery” warning before
automatically shutting off. He was so tired that he had made the
simple mistake of forgetting to charge it.

Putting the phone away, he looked at
the biopsy display as it came up on a second monitor window. It
showed a mass of cells that looked nothing like what he was
expecting to see. All had a spherical nucleus, but were of varying
sizes and amorphous in shape, as if the cell membrane had no
discernible boundary. There was a hazy look to the image, and
Vlad’s shock grew as he bumped up the magnification to 1,000X and
saw filaments, tendrils, joining the cells together.

“No,” he breathed. “This is not
possible!” He had seen this before: it was the malleable tissue of
a harvester, and these morphing cells gave the creatures their
ability to change shape and color.

But there were several other cell
types visible in the mass, cells he hadn’t seen before in the
detailed autopsies and analyses that had been done on the captured
harvesters. He could only guess at their functions until he had
time to run further tests.

Shaking his head in wonder, he
brought up the webcam showing the inside of the biosafety
containment chamber to see what the monkey’s physical condition
was.

The image was blank. The camera must
have malfunctioned.

Muttering a stream of expletives in
Russian, Vlad got up and headed for the mezzanine level and the
sealed room with the biosafety containment chambers.

***

Renee had only gotten a few fitful
hours of sleep after the team had left for Spitsbergen. She could
normally drop off to sleep quickly and rarely dreamed, but sleep
hadn’t come very easily this time. When it finally had, it was full
of very intense, violent images that she couldn’t remember now.
Thankfully.

“I’m going to die of coffee
poisoning,” she muttered darkly as she took another swallow of the
strong brew.

The command center was fully manned
now. Renee, being the senior person, was in charge of the base in
Naomi’s absence, and she sat at the circular console that
overlooked the rest of the command center. She had received a call
from Ferris on the plane’s satellite phone to let her know that
they’d landed safely – more or less – after a huge fireworks show
at the airport on Spitsbergen, and that the team was heading up the
mountain toward the vault.

After that, Ferris had dutifully
called back periodically to report on what he was hearing from up
the mountain slope, but he couldn’t see what was happening with all
the smoke. Naomi and Jack both had satellite phones, but neither
had tried to call, and Renee had orders not to call them unless it
was an absolute emergency. Renee had wanted to pick up the phone
half a dozen times, but knew they were probably a tad busy. The
last thing they needed was the phone ringing while they were trying
to kill a harvester.

“Dammit,” she grumped. She hated not
knowing. She felt like her kids were out there and in terrible
trouble, and it was tearing her up.

The world situation wasn’t looking
any better. Not only had the Earth Defense Society received top
billing for the most wanted organization in the world by everyone
from local sheriffs to Interpol, but there was a growing amount of
finger-pointing going on between various countries in the aftermath
of the attacks on the genebanks. Russia and Norway were already
waging a war of words over sending military forces to Spitsbergen,
with both sides claiming the other was responsible for the sudden
outage of the critical SvalSat communications facility there that
had cut off communications to hundreds of thousands of people.
Renee didn’t have to hack into anyone’s computers to know that both
countries were mobilizing troops along their mutual border: it was
all over the news.

Making things worse was that Norway
was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, which
had originally been founded to counter the Soviet Union during the
Cold War. While the Soviet Union and its puppet Warsaw Pact were
long since gone, Russia still felt very threatened by NATO, and
knew that the other NATO countries were bound by their treaty
obligations to come to Norway’s aid if she were attacked. None of
the other NATO countries had yet put any troops on alert, but the
news had reported that the senior NATO command staff had been
called in for an emergency meeting at Norway’s request. That had
further angered the Russians, and the news services were claiming
that there were unverified reports of more Russian troops on the
way to Spitsbergen, along with Russian warships from the Northern
Fleet getting ready to put to sea.

The reports from
other parts of the world were just as bad, if not worse. Despite
the televised claims of the
faux
Gregg Thornton laying responsibility for the
attacks on the Earth Defense Society, India was blaming China for
the destruction of their seed vault in Ladakh in the far north of
the country. It had been near the Line of Actual Control, a
disputed boundary since the war India fought, and lost, with China
in 1962. China, in its turn, blamed India for the destruction of
their genebank in Beijing, asserting that if India had not
committed the act itself, it had acted as a conduit for the
terrorists who had. There had already been two minor skirmishes
between army units patrolling the borders, with three reported
fatalities.