The Omega Project (26 page)

The severed object lay in the shadows. Trembling, I picked it up and carried it outside to examine it in the light.

It was a human foot, severed at the ankle. The wound was cauterized, as if the blade that had sliced cleanly through flesh, sinew, and bone had been superheated.

It was a woman’s left foot.

I knew because it was Andria’s.

Sickened, I turned away from Oscar and retched, then found a patch of blue-green moss and laid down in it. Oscar had lost the equivalent of a foot, yet I had not lost my last meal over that … for the record, the squid’s missing appendage had already started growing back. But the thought of seeing Andria deformed … even if this
was
a dream–

“Wait a second … ABE, confirm an observation: The winged Andria Saxon we saw last night through Oscar’s eyes … she wasn’t missing a foot, was she?

OBSERVATION CONFIRMED. ANDRIA SAXON WAS NOT MISSING A FOOT.

“But this is Andria Saxon’s foot, correct?”

CORRECT.

“Explain.”

INSUFFICIENT DATA AVAILABLE TO FORMULATE A HYPOTHESIS.

“Thanks loads. Where the hell am I supposed to find more data?”

CLUES MAY BE FOUND ABOARD
OCEANUS
.

*   *   *

Ninety-seven minutes. That’s how long it took me, through ABE, to paint a mental picture of
Oceanus
to Oscar. And still the cephaloped hesitated.

ABE, yes or no—can Oscar get us down to the beach without me having to rappel down a twelve-hundred-foot rock face?

YES.

Then let’s go. Tell him to lead the way.

THE ROUTE TO THE SEA IS KNOWN ONLY TO OSCAR’S KIND. THE ROUTE CUTS THROUGH THE CEPHALOPED GATHERING. OSCAR TRUSTS EISENBRAUN, BUT DOES NOT TRUST EISENBRAUN’S FEELINGS TOWARD THE ENTITY RECOGNIZED AS ANDRIA SAXON.

Can’t say I trust them myself. Does Oscar know where Andria Saxon lives?

YES.

Will Oscar take me there?

NO.

I gritted my teeth, exasperated.
ABE, tell Oscar that Eisenbraun wants to stop Andria Saxon and her kind from capturing any more of Oscar’s kind. In order to do that
—

Without warning, Oscar flipped out. Raising two of its thick arms into the air, the terrestrial squid proceeded to pound the patch of moss like a silverback gorilla, throwing the equivalent of a cephaloped tantrum. Waving its tentacles wildly, the creature then spun around and uprooted fistfuls of ferns before it darted up the trunk of a redwood like a spider monkey, thrashing about in the upper canopy.

“Got a bit of a temper, doesn’t he?” I pondered my potential courses of action as debris rained upon my head and shoulders from above. My first instinct, arguably an emotional one, was to find Andria, resolve the mysteries surrounding our shared reality, then turn this nightmare into a pleasant dream.

The scientist in me vetoed that idea. Before tracking down my former fiancée or the rest of the crew, I needed to inspect the cryogenic chamber aboard
Oceanus
before the habitat washed back out to sea with the next tidal event.

ABE, calculate the next full-moon perigee.

THE MOON WILL PERIGEE IN SIXTEEN DAYS.

I surveyed the surrounding forest. The dense foliage of the redwood canopy was strewn with vines, some rigid, dried out growths, others moist, flexible coils resembling giant Hawaiian leis—the latter perfect for mountain climbs and descents.

The upper branches rustled, yielding a cluster of ripe mangoes that splattered nearby, soaking my feet. “All right, you big hairy octopus, you got your way. Now get your ass down here, we have work to do. And bring me some food!”

*   *   *

It was midafternoon, the sun high in a cloudless blue sky when Oscar followed me out of the forest and into the clearing, hauling what I hoped would be the last bundle of vines we would need to rappel down to the beach. As the cephaloped watched, I secured the first length of leis-rope around the trunk of a Douglas fir located sixty paces from the summit’s ledge, then began adding sections, lengthening the vine another seventy to one hundred feet at a time.

The ability to tie knots seemed to baffle the curious creature. “It’s called an opposable thumb,” I said, wiggling the digits. “It’s what separates the brains from the brawn. Don’t sweat it, in another ten million years your kind may possesses something similar.”

Having completed my task, I attempted to drag the bulky coil of vines to the edge of the plateau, but could barely budge the pile.

Oscar snatched it off the ground with two tentacles, picking it up easily.

“Okay, I’ll admit there are benefits that come with having suckers and tentacles.”

I led Oscar to the edge of the cliff, motioning him to toss the vine over the ledge. The two of us watched as the slack unfurled more than a thousand feet before the excess settled on the rock pilings below.

A few miles to the north,
Oceanus
towered over the deserted valley like a giant olive-green marble. My pulse raced as I realized it was time again to risk life and limb.

I had rappelled down the face of a mountain twice—both times with Andria—and I had not been very good at it. This rock was higher, my vine rope was untested, save for an abbreviated descent from the redwood canopy, and I lacked everything from a harness and carabiner to shoes—the latter fact establishing itself as I stepped out onto the hot flat rock, blistering the soles of my bare feet.

Sensing my distress, the massive squid suddenly scooped me off the ground. Before I could protest, I found myself suspended twelve hundred feet in space as Oscar climbed down the sheer rock face in herky-jerky heart-stopping ten-foot drops and catches. I had no choice but to hang on to the thick hairy tentacle supporting my body, as the cephaloped’s other appendages alternately slipped and caught narrow ledges of rock in our semicontrolled free fall.

“Jesus, Oscar—at least use the vine!”

Despite my rants, the cephaloped stubbornly refused to grip the vine, which remained within a tantalizing arm’s reach. I’d have grabbed the damn thing myself had I not been holding on for dear life.

Three minutes later we were ten feet from landing on the ground when Oscar abruptly stopped, reached out to the vine, and handed it to me.

“Ha-ha, the octopus has a sense of humor.”

The octopus refused to budge.

Reluctantly, I reached out and grabbed the vine, rappelling the last ten feet.

Red faced, I turned around to find the creature gesticulating wildly with six of its eight tentacles as it splattered a rock with urine from an unseen cavity.

THE CEPHALOPED IS AMUSED.

“Hey, suck-face, I’m glad I could amuse you.” Feeling the urge myself, I thought about peeing over Oscar’s urine-drenched rock as a retort, but having no idea what the gesture might translate to in cephaloped, decided against it.

In truth, I was taken by Oscar’s display of wit, something a world apart from simple playfulness. The cephaloped clearly possessed a sense of humor—a trait of intelligence reserved for … well, for humans.

My urge to urinate increased at the sound of running water.

It was a waterfall, its reverberating acoustics originating farther to the north. My first thought was that it was the runoff from the bat cavern, but looking up, I saw several locations spewing freshwater along the towering rock face—feeder systems running from the fertile forests above, draining into a shallow river that snaked north across the wasteland of sand.

I had not seen the waterway when I was in the cave, my vantage obscured by the waterfall’s mist, and had missed it days earlier when it had been submerged, along with the rest of the valley by the full moon’s devastating tidal surge.

I headed for the bank to cool off—only to have Oscar veer me away.

“No more jokes, pal. I’m tired and hot, and I could use a drink.”

The cephaloped placed a tentacle lightly across my right shoulder, its sucker pad coming to rest along the back of my neck, the physical contact allowing the creature to transmit its thoughts through my bio-chip.

EXTREME DANGER.

What danger? Bats?

BATS ARE NOT DANGER. TEETH ARE DANGER.

Teeth? Define “teeth.”

Leading me by the arm, Oscar escorted me on a bizarre zigzagging trek across the beach, heading in a roundabout direction for
Oceanus
.

Half a mile away, the cephaloped stopped, gesturing to a smooth avenue of sand pressed four to five feet deep. Each side of the thirty-foot-wide compression was bordered by an occasional five-segmented, four clawed paw print—the paw print as wide as a pickup truck.

ABE, what in the hell could have—

THE SPECIES IS A MEMBER OF THE FAMILY CROCODYLIDAE.

A crocodile? That big?

EVOLUTION HAS DIVERSIFIED SEVERAL BRANCHES OF CROCODILIANS THAT HAVE SPAWNED GIANTS. THE PREHISTORIC CROCODILE,
SARCOSUCHUS,
AVERAGED FORTY FEET IN LENGTH.
DEINOSUCHUS
, WHICH LIVED IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS, WAS SLIGHTLY LARGER.

And just for shits and grins, how big would you say the croc was that left these tracks?

SIXTY TO SEVENTY FEET, WEIGHING FIFTY TO SIXTY TONS.

“Wonderful.” Using the binoculars, I scanned the terrain, my hands trembling noticeably. Jason Sloan had promised me cheerleaders and wet dreams; instead I found myself stuck in a monster movie, with my girlfriend cast as the vampiress from—

WARNING: THIS IS NOT A DREAM. TAKE PROPER PRECAUTIONS. CROCODILES ARE AMBUSH HUNTERS. AVOID THE RIVER. CROCODILES HAVE A KEEN SENSE OF HEARING. COMMUNICATE ONLY THROUGH THOUGHT ENERGY WHILE IN THE VALLEY.

Reading ABE’s thoughts, Oscar dragged me by the arm toward
Oceanus
.

23

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

—E
RIC
H
OFFER
, American social writer and philosopher

Oceanus
towered before us—a relic from another age, washed ashore in another world. The remains of a lone anchor leg, acting like a bicycle kickstand, kept the giant sphere oriented on its vertical axis.

The habitat’s appearance was gruesome. Scientists had chemically rendered and treated the aero gel skin to remain impervious to the prolonged effects of being submerged for extended periods of time, but even the most imaginative among them could not have foreseen this.

Time had been both cruel and innovative. At one point the entire lower bowl had been sealed in a concretelike layer of hard corals. As we walked around the sphere, ABE identified colonies of bottlebrush, bubble, and staghorn coral, each having multiplied in a variety of shapes and sizes. As the previous coral colonies had died, new ones had grown on top of their limestone skeletons, creating a living habitat for hundreds of species of fish, sponges, and bottom-dwelling marine invertebrates.

At least that was how ABE described
Oceanus
’s existence—up until the moment the coral reef had become so heavy it had collapsed one of the ship’s anchor arms. The impact with the seafloor had cracked the reef; the subsequent destruction of its remaining three arms and the rolls that followed—witnessed by yours truly—having crushed and shed major sections of coral from
Oceanus
’s skin, so that the lower bowl of the habitat now appeared like the bottom half of a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle with sizeable chunks of its pieces missing.

The upper bowl seemed forged from an entirely different past.

According to ABE, Antarctica’s melting ice sheet would have eventually exposed
Oceanus
’s upper hemisphere to the sun. As the sea warmed, first algae then sea grass had taken root, no doubt feeding the sea life living in the coral reef below. In a marvelous symbiotic relationship with its environment,
Oceanus
had in essence become an ecosystem both outside its walls and within.

While anchored underwater that ecosystem had flourished; on land the vegetation had quickly dried out and died. Clusters of dead plant life now hung from the ship’s upper bowl like long tufts of green-brown hair on an aging human skull. Every few minutes another dried-out cluster would drop off the habitat, adding to a ring of algae and seaweed piled five feet high in the sand.

There was only one possible entrance into
Oceanus
—the egress chamber from which I had made my escape. I circled the titanic sphere twice before Oscar gestured at the sealed hatch—as if the clever creature knew its purpose.

Reading my thoughts, I suppose it did.

Climbing atop the barrier of dead vegetation, I pulled open the egress hatch—releasing a waterfall of trapped seawater, drenching myself in the process. Oscar appeared to enjoy the unplanned comedy act, giving me a quick rendition of the cephaloped jig … and then it reached for the hatch with three tentacles and pulled itself inside the open chamber—hoisting me up seconds later.

The water that remained in the chamber was still chest-deep. Oscar seemed a different animal than the one I had shocked to consciousness back in the redwood pond, splaying itself underwater like an asterisk, reaching playfully for my legs as I waded by to access the control panel.

There was no groping blindly this time around for hatch controls or switches. While assigned to Beta Squad, I had uploaded into ABE’s memory every schematic and operations program Donald Bruemmer had brought on board. Now my trusty bio-chip could direct me in a microsecond of thought to any square inch of the ship.

Ducking underwater, I opened a control panel and tugged on a red handle, the manual release to vent the chamber. Sixty seconds later the interior hatch clicked open, allowing us access into the rest of the ship.