The Tomorrow Code (31 page)

Rebecca explained, “Only so many characters can fit into a gamma-ray burst, so the messages have been extremely short and cryptic. But we figured out enough to buy the submarine, to try to stop the Chimera Project, and to end up in the mess we’re in now.”

Tane added, “We’re not scoring too well at the moment.”

“No,” Crowe mused. “If it were true, and I’m not saying I believe you just yet, then it would raise some interesting complications. Have you heard of the grandfather paradox?”

“Oh God, don’t start,” Tane groaned. “You’ll be building a Möbius strip soon.”

“What?” Crowe asked, but got no answer.

“I’ve been thinking about the snowmen,” Rebecca said.

So that was why she had been so still for so long.

She continued, “And I don’t think they fit with your theory of bacterial clusters.”

“Go on,” said Crowe.

“And you surely don’t still think we’re dealing with terrorists?”

“Possibly not.”

Rebecca lapsed back into silence.

A new voice joined the conversation, and Tane realized that Manderson had shifted one of his long legs across, touching Rebecca’s and thus linking him in to the conversation.

Manderson said, “I might try sticking just my hand above water and seeing if I can pick up a signal. Let the others know where we are.”

Crowe’s helmet bobbed up and down in a nod. “Worth a try.”

Manderson rolled himself into a sitting position, then squatted, tentatively raising a hand up into the air above the pool.

“Blue Three, this is…” He stopped talking and snatched his hand into the water again as fast ripples spread across the surface of the pool toward him. The light cascaded in waves over the sides of the pool as some kind of feeding frenzy took place above them.

The short flurry of activity died away as Manderson lay back down on the floor of the pool. “Won’t be trying that again,” he said.

“Any chance the fog will move on?” Tane asked.

“It’s several miles wide and growing,” Crowe answered. “It won’t pass us by in time. We only have a couple of hours of air left.”

“And then what?” Rebecca asked.

“You tell me,” Crowe replied. “Ask your friends from the future.”

Manderson asked, “How did they know that I was there? I’m in a biosuit; they can’t smell me. They can’t see me, except for my hand. They’re not bothering Z1. How did they even know who or what I am?”

“Maybe they know what a human hand looks like,” Crowe conjectured.

The words connected with some hidden memory in Tane’s brain, and he said absently, “Shape recognition.”

“What’s that again?” Rebecca asked abruptly.

“Shape recognition,” Tane repeated, wondering where he had heard the phrase before.

Rebecca removed her hand, cutting herself out of the conversation, and was still again, thinking.

Tane looked at his oxygen gauge. What would they do when the air ran out? Face the snowmen? Pray that the fog had moved on more quickly than they expected? The only thing to do now was wait it out. “Don’t move too much,” Crowe had said to them just after they had submerged. “It uses oxygen.”

The tranquillity of the pool bottom was shattered suddenly with a huge splash, and Tane’s heart leaped inside his chest as something plunged into the water at the shallow end of the pool. It was a snowman. It had to be a snowman. He cowered away from the shock wave that swept past him and fought the urge to surface. That would be fatal.

It wasn’t a snowman. It was a rescue harness, attached to a long steel wire cable.

Crowe was at the harness in a second. He ignored it and grabbed the wire cable with his hand, using his free hand to key his radio.

It took Tane a moment to realize what he was doing. The steel cable acted as a huge aerial, taking the signal from Crowe’s radio out above the water. He touched Crowe lightly on the ankle, to hear the conversation.

“Rescue helicopter, this is Dr. Crowe of the USABRF,” Crowe said. “We are mighty glad to see you.”

A New Zealand accent came back through the earpiece, terse and professional. “Dr. Crowe, how many in your party? Over.”

“Six. How fast is your winch?”

“Two feet a second at full speed. Why do you ask? Over.”

“Not fast enough. We will be attacked on the way up. I repeat, we will be under attack on the way up. You have to get us clear of the fog faster than that.”

“We could climb as we winch. That would more than double the speed. Over.”

“That’ll have to do.”

Crowe motioned Rebecca toward him and strapped her into the harness. He grabbed the wire again. “Crowe to rescue helicopter. Allow some slack in the line also. Then start climbing and winching at the same time. You’ll whip us out of here like a slingshot.”

“Roger that. Over.”

“First person ready,” Crowe said. “Take her away.”

Rebecca grasped onto the harness tightly, as if she might fall out of it, although it was a secure-looking strap. Tane lifted a hand in a kind of goodbye wave, but she was already gone.

She was there one moment and not there the next as the whiplashing cable snatched her from the bottom of the pool like a tiny doll on the end of a bungee cord.

A moment or two later, the harness splashed back into the water, near Crowe. He pointed to Tane.

The harness felt snug and secure around his shoulders, but like Rebecca, he grasped it firmly. He had seen the speed of the whiplash and did not want to be jerked out of the harness by it. He clipped the handle of the Chronophone to a metal clip at his shoulder.

The cable above him tensed, and then suddenly the water was gone, fog rushing down past him. White shapes roared toward him, rising up with him, but then he was above the mist, hanging below a large black helicopter in the broad sunshine of a beautiful summer’s day.

He wanted to scream with exhilaration. It had been a short but wild ride. He clambered over the side of the helicopter with a little help from a crewman as he was winched on board.

He looked down. The helicopter was hovering well clear of the fog. Being careful. Just as well, he thought. If you knew what was roaming around in there, though, you’d be a lot higher still.

Ten or twenty minutes later, they were leaving the fog-covered township of Orewa behind them, soaring high above the mist on the black blades of the chopper.

Crowe was leaning forward, busy on the radio, asking questions, and answering them as well. Their faceplates were open and the fresh air tasted great.

Crowe sat back after a few moments and his eyes were grim. Tane had heard why. Four of his men had disappeared when the mist had rolled in from the north.

“What about Xena?” he asked Fatboy.

“We’ll go back for her later,” he said carefully. “When the fog has cleared.”

Tane wasn’t sure if that was likely to happen or not, but he let it go. He didn’t want to upset Rebecca any further.

She had been silent since they had been snatched off the rooftop, thinking, wordlessly working away inside her own mind. She looked up now, though, and said suddenly, “I know what they are.”

All eyes were on her.

“I bought into the idea of bacterial clusters”—she was looking directly at Crowe—“of giant pathogens, because we didn’t have any other ideas. But that didn’t explain, that couldn’t explain, the snowmen.”

She paused, thinking, and Crowe took the opportunity to interject, “It’s the best guess we’ve got. Until some more reasonable explanation is found. And I mean reasonable, not some fantastical story about—”

Rebecca was staring at him now, frowning, a look of realization slowly dawning on her face.

“You know, don’t you? You don’t want to admit it, but you know too.”

Crowe interrupted, “I don’t know what you’re—”

“The moment that Tane said ‘shape recognition.’ That’s when you realized. You couldn’t
not
have known. You’re an immunologist. Heck, I’m just a fourteen-year-old kid, so it took me a little longer to work it out, but you must have known straightaway.”

Southwell seemed shocked. “Rebecca, are you saying what I think you’re saying? My God, you’d better be wrong.”

“They are bacterial clusters,” Crowe insisted.

“They’re not! And you know they’re not.” Rebecca was thinking furiously now. “The strange Y-shaped jellyfish. Those…
things
…in the fog. It’s so obvious. You do know. I know you know.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Tane shouted. “What are they? What are the jellyfish if they’re not bacterial clusters?”

Rebecca spoke distinctly, as the rotor blades of the helicopter changed pitch in preparation for landing.

“Antibodies,” she said.

I
MMUNITY

Manderson lowered his eyes and
smiled quietly to himself. Crowe just sighed tiredly. Only Lucy Southwell looked kindly at Rebecca and said, “You know that’s impossible, don’t you?”

Manderson looked up with a bemused expression and said, “I suppose that would make the big ones, the snowmen, phagocytes of some kind.”

“Macrophages,” Rebecca said firmly. “Mother Nature’s immune system. Now triggered by Dr. Vicky Green. Against the human race.”

Southwell put a hand on her arm. “Rebecca, it’s an imaginative idea but just not very likely. Antibodies are simple proteins. They’re microscopic.”

“I never said they were human antibodies,” Rebecca said, and wouldn’t say anything else until the helicopter had landed on the lined green surface of the main playing field at the North Harbor Sports Stadium in Albany.

The Command and Control Center was set up in a sponsors’ lounge on the fourth floor of the stadium. Through huge plate-glass windows, the green rectangle of the rugby ground was now home to a number of helicopters and row upon row of armored fighting vehicles, preparing for battle.

Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy were waiting to leave. Their transportation was coming up from the central city. All vehicles here apparently were already hard at work, transporting troops and equipment to build the defensive line.

“They are antibodies,” Rebecca finally spoke again, in a small but determined voice. “Antibodies and macrophages. Accept it. You have to. You can’t defeat what you can’t understand.”

Crowe glanced momentarily up from a detailed topographical map of the surrounding area that he and a gray-haired officer from the SAS had been poring over for about fifteen minutes, discussing something called kill zones, along with fields of fire and “claymores.”

Crowe said without any further trace of humor, “Rebecca, even if that were possible, think about what you’re saying. That would make us—human beings—pathogens. Antibodies attack pathogens.”

“I know,” Rebecca said softly.

Crowe shook his head and turned back to his work. An SAS trooper entered, saluted, and passed a note to the SAS officer.

Rebecca said, “We think of the Earth as a lump of rock, floating through space. Just a big stone, conveniently placed in a nice warm spot for us to grow on, like mold on cheese. But that’s just a way of thinking about it. What if we thought of this planet in a different way. As a complex web of interrelated ecosystems, host to billions upon billions of smaller organisms.” She paused. “Not all that unlike the human body when you think about it.”