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“We had a team go into the mine, down to the depths where ASO-One penetrated. Down to where the creature lived.”
“The gaiaphage,” Dekka said, and swallowed hard after the word. The gaiaphage, that seething, inhuman evil that caused so much fear, so much pain, resulting finally in the birth of the monstrous child Gaia.
“Yes, the gaiaphage,” Peaks said. “The unholy mix of alien meteorite, uranium, and human DNA. We sent a team of six. One of the women on that team went mad and attacked her fellow team members with a pickax. She killed two, injured two more. They had to beat her down with sticks and stones. She’s a patient here, as a matter of fact, raving mad. A complete psychotic break.”
Dekka sat, silent.
“So we sent a second team, this time with two armed Marines. The Marines killed the team, and then themselves.”
“Jesus.”
“So we sent robots, modified bomb-disposal robots, and we were able to retrieve samples of what had been the gaiaphage. Just rock now, or so we thought. Dead. Inert. Then we tried a sample on test animals, chimpanzees. One of the chimps tore the face off her handler. And one of the chimps . . . Wait, I have the video.”
He tapped his keyboard and turned his monitor for Dekka to see. There was no sound, just video, showing a chimpanzee in a cage, and suddenly . . . the chimp was outside the cage.
“Teleportation. Taylor’s power,” Dekka said.
“We had to kill the chimps.”
Dekka snorted. “So you went looking for a better test subject, a better chimp: me.”
“We need to understand what we are dealing with,” Peaks said. “Whatever is down in that mine shaft still wields some kind of power. Decent people flee Perdido Beach. Criminals and lowlifes are drawn to it. The robots found beer bottles and cigarette butts in that cave. People have been in there, people we don’t know, people who were drawn there.”
“Why don’t you seal off the town?” Dekka demanded.
“And let the whole world know we have a malicious alien presence sitting out in the desert a few miles from the 101? People are still coming to terms with the fact that someone is out there, light-years away in space. People aren’t even close to accepting the fact that our entire world, the very laws of physics, are really no more secure than computer software.”
“People live their lives,” Dekka said with a shrug. “They come to my register at Safeway and buy their milk and their lettuce and go home to their spouses and kids and jobs.”
“Several fragments we know of have landed,” Peaks said. “You want to know where? ASO-Two came down in the Atlantic off the coast of Scotland and broke apart, spraying bits and pieces all over the Isle of Islay. ASO-Three landed in Iowa and someone stole it—a teenaged girl got most of it, as it happens. ASO-Four landed in the mountains of Afghanistan and fell into the hands of some very bad people.” He leaned into her, intensity like steam coming from his eyes. This was not calm, soothing Peaks, this was a scared, angry, determined, even fanatical Peaks. “So we sent a larger Special Forces team in to take back the rock, but there was a delay and our guys got there too late: they were annihilated to the last man. Not shot, though. See, we recovered the bodies. They had been turned inside out. You know how you pull off a glove and sometimes it turns inside out? Like that. Organs and bone on the outside. I’ve seen some terrible things . . .”
His eyes glittered at that, and some instinct of Dekka’s warned that there was more to the gloating tone of his voice. More secrets. More lies.
“The rock is out there, Dekka. Fragments of it are already out there, and more is coming.”
Dekka saw sweat shining on his forehead. His hands twined together, fingers twisting, before he caught himself and with an effort resumed his usual impassive expression. “We’ve got a monster out of some kids’ book terrorizing a Scottish island, a terrorist who can turn people inside out, a girl so fast she makes your old friend Brianna look like she’s standing still, and some unstable psycho art student calling himself Knightmare who so far has caused something like two billion dollars in damage and killed a hundred and nine people. That’s just for starters. We have possession of the Mother Rock, thank God; it’s on a ship surrounded by more firepower and surveillance than you could imagine, so it’s safe, but ASO-Six and ASO-Seven are yet to land.”
Dekka felt herself sinking into her chair and almost wishing Peaks had not told her. The meteorite, identical to the alien rock that caused the Perdido Beach Anomaly, was spreading out across the globe.
Peaks said, “The physicists at CERN and MIT are trying to make sense of, well, the physics. They’re scared. They’re scared in ways that I lack the education and the IQ to even understand. But I’m not required to understand that, I’m only required to find a way to . . . to counter . . . the likely immediate results.”
“Which are?”
He leaned across his desk and lowered his voice, his trick for conveying sincerity.
“Did you see the dark watchers?”
Dekka froze. She immediately knew what he was referring to.
He allowed her silence to stand, taking it as acknowledgment. “We used to think the ASOs were part of a benign alien effort to sow life across the galaxy. We believed the gaiaphage had attained consciousness solely because of a twist of fate—the impact with uranium and human DNA. But we’re not so sure of that anymore, Dekka. We are beginning to suspect that the ASO virus is itself intelligent. And that its intentions are not in any way benign. We think it is capable of using any DNA at hand—Justin DeVeere had swordfish and lobster and appears to have a chitin armor, like lobster shell. And you saw the blade arm. But we also think it has the ability to exploit thought patterns. Needless to say, this is decades, centuries, beyond our abilities.”
Dekka said nothing.
“Do you understand what that means, Dekka? If true, it means that Earth has already been invaded by hostile aliens. And that means Perdido Beach writ large,” Peaks said. “Your gaiaphage metastasized. A new world, Dekka, a world where individuals, some friendly, some not, some good, some not, may acquire powers so great that our police forces and our intelligence assets and even our armies may be unable to cope. And even the best of the people who develop powers, even the heroes, will be watched and, we have to assume, be influenced, by the consciousness that is in those Anomalous Space Objects. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“It sounds bad,” Dekka said, unable to conjure up a better word.
“Bad? Bad? Dekka, the world we’ve known may be coming to an end.”
