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Cruz stared at the crane, at the glass-enclosed cabin, and saw the strange, plasticine version of Shade.
The crane backed away, then swung its ponderous weight again and hit Napalm in the chest. The crane rose, straightening its articulated arm, and slammed down on Napalm’s head.
Sparks flew from Napalm, and liquid fire gushed through the cracks and ran down like blood.
Napalm fell to his knees. His back was a tornado of stone and magma, as he was slowly, relentlessly, ripped apart.
And then, all at once, it no longer mattered.
CHAPTER 25
Something Worse
THE MOTHER ROCK had sunk deep, deep under the Pacific. It had not stayed long, but in the time it was there it had encountered many amazing life-forms. And when it was raised from the ocean floor it had retained DNA in its little cracks and pits and holes. A cornucopia. A giant buffet of some of Earth’s strangest DNA.
The Mother Rock, itself a tiny fragment of the original planetoid, was suffused with an alien-engineered virus of incredible sophistication, programmed with a sort of instinct that could give an impression of conscious will. It absorbed DNA and used it to play with other life-forms, mixing and remixing like a malicious DJ.
So when Vincent Vu ate some of the Mother Rock, he ingested not only the alien mutagenic virus it carried, but also the DNA of two of nature’s stranger creatures: Leptasterias aequalis, a starfish, and the more boringly named sea star associated densovirus.
The Leptasterias aequalis had five arms, each coated with spiny armor. Beneath each of the five arms were dozens of tiny tube feet that moved the starfish. Most of its vital organs were in the central disk, the nexus of the five arms. It was one of nature’s more harmless creations—in its natural state, for in its natural state it was so small it could rest comfortably on the pad of a man’s thumb.
But matters of scale were no problem for the Mother Rock’s own virus.
The Mother Rock’s virus was fascinated—in a purely mechanical way—by a very, very distant relation, the densovirus (as were a number of human scientists), for the densovirus had a very strange and gruesome effect: it caused sea stars to tear themselves apart. It caused starfish to amputate their own arms.
One arm of an affected starfish would simply start to walk away from its body. It would motor its tube feet and pull and pull until it began to tear, until the skin ripped and white meat appeared. It would pull away, marching on its hundreds of tube feet, each a tiny white cylinder ending in a sucker, and it would keep pulling as viscera separated and strings of gut were stretched to breaking.
The alien mutagenic virus found that the densovirus fit its profile for something . . . useful.
Vincent Vu had first morphed thirty-six hours earlier. Then he had filled his mother’s cabin so quickly that he’d had to squeeze out into the corridor, which itself was too confined, so he had simply started pushing down bulkheads and then bursting through decks, spreading his growing bulk through the ship.
The captain kept a pistol aboard for emergencies, but he died before reaching it. The six security people came at the morphed Vincent with disciplined but harmless fire, and he had killed them as well.
His mother had pleaded with Vincent, begged him, told him he needed help . . . and he had crushed her beneath one massive arm, tube legs tearing her dying body apart.
Vincent Vu had felt bad about that, but he’d had no choice. She was trying to stop him! And the new voices in his head, the ones that spoke without words, had seized on his delusion and encouraged him to believe that yes, he was Abaddon, yes, he really was Satan’s angel, yes, he was being sent to purge the earth of verminous humans. Vincent had never been the most stable of humans. He’d already listened to the mad voices in his head, the voices of the most dreaded of all mental illnesses, schizophrenia. But now he had acquired shocking power and a whole new set of voices. And he had murdered his mother. The unstable, deteriorating Vincent was now beyond mere instability; he was, in short, stark raving mad.
Stark raving mad, and terrifyingly dangerous.
Vincent Vu morphed was a creature of five massive, thick, crusty, bright red arms. He filled the Okeanos. At the center of this starfish body, rising like a flower’s stamen, was Vincent . . . or at least Vincent from the waist up. He appeared almost to be riding the great starfish.
Where Vincent’s human body melded into the starfish was a sort of girdle of tentacles, another gift of aquatic DNA, very much like Drake’s whip hand but thinner and twice as long, and each—as he had discovered to his delight—carried a corrosive, acidic tip.
During the long trip to the Port of Los Angeles, Vincent’s starfish body had torn itself apart, arms walking off on their own. But as the densovirus caused him to tear himself apart, new legs grew quickly to replace the departed sections.
And the runaway arms, driven to tear themselves free, were still mostly under the command of Vincent Vu. Those runaway arms had become his servants, his henchmen. They slithered and crawled throughout the ship, smothering crewmen to death—and those were the lucky ones. The less fortunate ones were disassembled, piece by piece, square inch by square inch. Some had taken hours to die.
Even less lucky crew members were . . . absorbed. The arm sections crawled over the backs of screaming men and women, penetrated their bodies with their tubular legs, grew inside the helpless victims, and made puppets of them—twisted, scarred, disfigured puppets. One such puppet had concealed his disfigurement with a hood and had been the one to tie off the ship.
But the need for concealment was past. The ship was under attack by a powerful monster who was after the Mother Rock. Vincent could not allow that.
He was too big to simply emerge from belowdecks. His red arms extended down corridors into engineering, into the labs, into the sleeping quarters, into the holds. From the tip of one leg to the other, Vincent Vu now stretched 140 feet. For the last six hours, with land in sight, and the Navy handing escort duty over to the Coast Guard, Vincent had been in complete control of the ship. His puppets had said all the right things over the radio, had done all the right things bringing the ship into port.
Vincent hated the idea of leaving the ship, but Napalm was leaving him no choice. So he squeezed himself and pushed his human form up through the hold the better to see the situation. He was, at first sight, a thin, bare-chested boy.
And then, having seen Napalm, Vincent simply pushed upward with all parts of his great, extended body. The upward pressure buckled the decks. The few remaining bulkheads broke free from decks with a se
ries of crunches and snaps. The superstructure tilted. The sides of the ship bulged outward.
