Fire with Fire(119)

A canny man . . . thought Caine.

“—and he seemed in good shape for his age. Amazing shape, given what I am—no, was—used to seeing when I met people who were in their mid-eighties. Did he have heart disease for a long time?”

“Well, he had cardiac problems for thirty-five years—but it wasn’t disease: it was damage.”

“Damage? How?”

“In 2083, Admiral Corcoran was the commander of the mission that went to intercept what has come to be called the ‘Doomsday Rock.’ You’ve heard of it by now, right?”

“Just that it was heading straight for us. And after that, there was a much higher commitment to space development.”

“Yeah. It gave us a good scare. The rock came straight in from the far reaches of the Kuiper belt. Normally, we would have expected a culprit from that area to be a comet. Because it wasn’t, we didn’t see it until very late.”

“Why?”

“Because comets leave visible tails of vapor and debris; asteroids do not. And it was approaching on a retrograde trajectory. Meaning less time to intercept.”

“Okay, but how did Nolan get injured? EVA accident? A crash?”

Caine shook his head. “Nothing that dramatic. Just too much acceleration. For too long.”

“So that’s what killed him, cardiac failure?”

Downing came up behind them in the hall. “No, not cardiac failure—although it looked that way at first.”

Caine glanced sharply at Downing as they entered the conference room, acoustic-damping panels lining the wall like immense gray waffles. “What do you mean? What else have you found?”





Chapter Thirty-Six

MENTOR

“We found this in Nolan.” Downing moved to the head of the conference table, dimmed the lights and snapped on the display screen. The diagram of a torso—the heart outlined in muddy maroon—faded in. A moment later—in Day-Glo green—a sinuous collection of filaments sprung into existence on the heart itself, first winding along the external walls of its chambers and then sending strands into the spine and upward from there. There was a second of silence.

“What the hell is that?” Trevor’s outburst was raw, emotional.

Downing shrugged. “We don’t know, despite a painstaking post-mortem analysis that took Bethesda the better part of two months. Even so, they almost missed it.”

Trevor gaped at the intricate windings. “They almost missed that?”

“Yes. Because, by the time they were conducting the post-mortem, there was almost nothing left of it. This is only an approximate reconstruction of what was in Nolan when he died. By the time they were examining his body in detail, these filaments had almost totally denatured. They deliquesced even as the specialists were trying to run tests. All that was left were traces: simple proteins, amino acids, nothing definitive.”

“So, was this some kind of infection?” Elena sounded lost.

It was Opal who spoke, and with singular decisiveness. “That’s no infection. Not in the regular sense of the word. Look at how it went straight from the heart toward the spine, and braided itself up toward the skull. Excuse me, Elena, Trevor, but there’s no delicate way to ask these questions—”

Elena nodded. “Certainly; we understand.”

“—but what was found upon examination of the cerebral cortex?”

“Nothing definitive. If there was something there, it decayed before the rest of—whatever this is.”

Opal stared. “It’s a parasite,” she announced.

“Or—” The voice was Caine’s. Downing saw him staring at the screen over steepled fingers.

“Or?” prompted Opal.

“Or it’s a symbiote.”

She looked surprised and turned back to the screen. Then she nodded. “He’s right. There’s no way—looking at this—to tell how the organism functioned in relation to its host. But if it was Nolan’s cause of death—”

Caine smiled and looked at Downing. “But it wasn’t, was it?”

Downing felt the small hairs on his neck rise up: how did he know? “No, it wasn’t. At least, we have no conclusive evidence that it was.”

Everyone was staring at Caine, except Elena, whose eyes were aimed off into the darkness.

Trevor sounded truculent. “Okay, I’ve had just about enough of this episode of Mystery Theater. This is my father we’re talking about, and I’d be a lot happier if people start talking plainly.”

Caine held up one hand. “Hey, look: I’m no expert. I’m just guessing.”

“Yeah—but you’re guessing pretty well.”