Animalis (7 page)

“I’ll get it,” he said.

Hodge started to spread the parts over the floor of the cabin. It didn’t seem too complicated. Jax started to see where pieces fit together.

Grimshaw came to the wall beside Jax and whispered to him, “Hodge really loves to feel like he’s helping out. I love to see him working. See? Look at how excited his eyes get! But he has a hard time focusing when he’s like this. He’ll start moving things around because he has a plan for everything. But then he’ll move things around again. He can put it together—he always does—but he can’t stop reorganizing things.”

Jax nodded. He could see now how Hodge had moved apart the pieces intended to interlock. At this rate, Moxie and Little Hank wouldn’t have anything to keep them from being slammed into the back of the cabin at launch.

“Here, Hodge.” Jax moved toward him to point to some pieces.

Grimshaw held his arm and pulled him back gently.

Hodge snarled and snapped at Jax, teeth just inches from his hand. Jax pulled his arm away from Grimshaw, ready to defend himself. What was Hodge doing? It had almost bitten him.

“Hey, watch it!” Jax said. He cut his eyes at Hodge and felt a justified hatred boil up inside himself.

“Jax, move back please,” Grimshaw said. She smiled. “Hodge, I’m sorry, but we need to get this together. Look at how organized it is. Thank you so much. Can you start getting together some supper for after the launch?”

Hodge smiled. “It looks good, doesn’t it? I almost had it all together. What would you like, Hurley?”

“I think your stir fry would be great, and tonight definitely deserves a dessert. Don’t you think?” Grimshaw said. “Does vegetable stir fry sound alright to you, Jax?”

Jax frowned a little. He still wanted to kick Hodge for snapping at him. How could Grimshaw live with him? One of these days, it could kill her in her sleep, and she never would have seen it coming.

“That sounds great, thank you,” Jax said.

“Okay,” Grimshaw said.

Hodge left down the hall.

“Can you give me a hand with this?” she asked Jax.

“I thought you said Hodge liked doing this stuff,” Jax said. He started picking up the pieces of the gyroscope to put together. “What was up with that? He tried to bite me?”

Grimshaw knelt down with the parts that made up the shaft that would hold the ball in place on the cabin floor. “It’s hard to explain. It’s a duality of his personality, I guess.” She handed Jax a piece from her pile. “I don’t really know, but I do know when to expect it. There’s this mental zone that’s both intense, focused, and active, but at the same time, on edge. He might nip at you, but he would only bite you if he was really in a tight situation.”

When she handed him another piece of the gyroscope, Jax noticed the warmth of her hand in his for just a moment. He pulled his hand away too quick and the piece fell to the floor. Both of their hands reached for it a second time and Jax started to pull his hand away to avoid touching her skin again.

With a gentle grip, Grimshaw caught his hand and turned his palm face up. She set the piece solidly in his hand while looking at him, said, “There,” and pushed his fingers up around the object to hold it in place.

It made Jax feel silly for feeling uncomfortable about the touch of her hand. He wasn’t trying to hold her hand, and her actions showed that she knew that.

They put the rest of the ball together quickly and then attached it to the floor. It wasn’t a moment too soon: they were next up for launch. Grimshaw and Hodge helped get Moxie and Little Hank into the ball, and then they all strapped into their harnesses.

Chapter 6

The Pyramid

The launch was smooth. After a minute of intense electromagnetic acceleration, the plane shot off the end of the launch shaft and into the air. Once they were climbing quickly to the upper atmosphere, they unbuckled their harnesses. Hodge went to the small kitchen, between the cockpit and the living room, to finish preparing dinner.

A message appeared in Jax’s retina monitor:

Jax, come to my cabin. ~ Hank.

Jax excused himself and stopped at the cabin door, knocking lightly. The door folded open and he saw Hank standing in front of three walls overflowing with pictures and information.

“Hank, you’re a much worse nerd than I ever imagined. Look at this, you could be an insane genius.”

“Sorry I left you alone with that thing,” Hank said when the door closed. He was still manipulating one of the blocks of information he had pulled up. “We’re lucky the planes didn’t put down in a private airport. The captain says the cargo of the first plane is gone. The first unit is already on site, and they found the plane empty. The one we were on has only been on the ground for four hours—almost six by the time we get there—so we’ll be able to track it if it goes to a new location.” He pointed to two images he had up of the planes. “But that’s not what I have been focused on.”

Hank expanded another image. It was an illustration of a machine. It looked massive, with several tanks full of liquid, and hoses creating a spiderweb tapestry among the tanks.

“What on Earth is that thing?” Jax asked. “It looks like something from the turn of the last century, maybe even the century before that. Did they even have computers back then?”

“This image is from a conspiracy theory about the origins of the Animalis.”

Hank pulled over another image. This one was of a huge, black-eyed alien superimposed above the Earth, cradling a cylinder between its hands. There was a stencil on the cylinder depicting evolutionary steps from a monkey to a man to an Animalis.

“An even more ridiculous idea about the origins of the Animalis,” Hank said. “But this,” he said as he pointed to an image of a pyramid, “might be the real thing. The Ivanovich Machine that created the Animalis.”

The image of the pyramid was from a CT scan. Dimensions listed beside it said eight feet tall and nine feet across at the base. It had four sides and was hollow. The outer edges consisted of two-inch-wide, one-foot-thick beams. The surface of the beams was smooth and plain. Where the beams connected, at the corners, the surfaces joined in smooth curves, giving it a professional, well-made look. It appeared large enough to stand up in, and sturdy enough to hang on the beams.

“Ivanovich Machine … You said that to the captain. I’ve never heard of it. Didn’t Romanov create them?” Jax asked.

“No, Romanov funded it. Schools put all the emphasis on Romanov, and the blame. But the scientist Ivanovich actually created them. And no one ever knew how he did it. Perfect, seamless, self-sustaining genetics. Not sterile.” Hank brought up more documents. “Not sterile—it’s huge. For two centuries, that alone has stumped geneticists.” Hank looked at Jax. “There has always been an unfulfilled promise by scientists, that they could start bringing back extinct species. But they can’t. Every example—passenger pigeons, white rhinoceros, dinosaurs—everything they create has all been sterile.”

Jax just nodded, feeling like the material was getting beyond him.

“Even the theory of evolution is suspect,” Hank said. “It postulates that through natural selection, where the mutations that improve an animal’s chance of survival are passed on, whole new species can evolve. But whenever an animal’s genes have been manipulated too far—say, breeding squirrels to have an opposable tail—instead of creating a new species, they go sterile. It’s as if the species can bend a little, but always breaks before something new is created. So when thousands of totally new species are suddenly walking around Russia, geneticists were shocked.”

“I’ve never heard of the Animalis being a scientific mystery,” Jax said. “How come you’ve never told me about this before?” He knew Hank wasn’t making it up, but Jax felt like he should have heard at least some of this before.

Hank shrugged. “I wasn’t sure I believed any of the specific theories before now. Of course, when the Animalis were created, it seemed to confirm everything the scientists had been theorizing. And now they have spent the last century trying to reproduce the results. But they can’t. It isn’t that there’s a moral obligation not to; there are plenty of scientists trying. No evolutionist or geneticist is going to admit that they can’t reproduce what was supposed to be possible a hundred years ago. And everyone outside of that tight circle of scientists goes on thinking that there’s no mystery.

“So this theory has formed, from people that know this, trying to guess at how Ivanovich could have done it. He knew something about genetics that we are still trying to understand today.

“There’s a second mystery that this theory tries to explain. The Animalis had all been groomed for human society when they were discovered. And there were families of them with two-year-old pups. We know that most species of Animalis sexually mature at around age seven, which means that Ivanovich made most, if not all of the originals, at the very beginning of the ten years he was working for Romanov.

“The proponents of the theory claim that the Animalis DNA was altered remotely, all at once—as in, there had been no shots, no injections of viruses to mechanically change the DNA. Thousands of animal embryos were all altered within days of each other, something that would be impossible unless his machine worked remotely, and altered the DNA instantaneously.”

“Okay, I track with you so far,” Jax said.

“They suggest that for every strand of DNA, there is a unique peptide—which is a special type of protein—that can communicate with other DNA peptides in a remote exchange of quantum mechanical information. There is some scientific grounding to the concept of the DNA peptides being linked in a kind of wireless network. We know now that there is a connection between peptides in the cells of a living creature. Cells that are blocked from receiving messages from peptides gaining and losing ions in chemical reactions will still receive the information the host body is sending. I tend to agree that the information is held as a kind of code in the spin of the atoms themselves; that’s why I call it an exchange of quantum mechanical information.”

“Mmmm,” Jax said. “Now you’re starting to lose me. So … you think that DNA has its own sort of … internet? All of them are linked together in a network?”

Hank smiled. “Yes. That’s a great analogy. And the Ivanovich Machine is a terminal to access that internet. Every form of life is like a personal computer, and DNA are the blocks of memory. They hold program codes that make organisms function. And like computers, they have security that blocks us from making changes. But the Ivanovich Machine would have a universal key that lets it through the security.

“When an animal is growing, the machine can change the instructions to create a new creature. But if the animal is too far along in development, changes in the DNA could be lethal. Say you wanted to give yourself wings instead of arms. Well, your heart is still pumping while your veins break apart to move into their new position, and you die from internal bleeding before taking your first test flight.

“I could still be wrong about it all, but it’s a terrifying machine if it is real. All DNA would be in your control. You could try and force too great a change on a whole species, and have instant extinction, or change every human embryo to grow into deformed pig-men.”

“So we destroy it … if it’s real?” Jax asked.

“Not yet. And I believe it’s real. So does the captain. I’m sending a proposal to him that we retrieve it, making it the top priority for this mission, so that the technology can be understood. We can’t let it be destroyed, because we need to know how to defend ourselves against it if anyone ever builds another machine like it.” Hank closed the programs running on the walls.

Jax folded his arms, thinking. Hank seemed to be convinced the pyramid was an advanced DNA machine. He had done the research. He knew more than Jax ever would about DNA, and genetics, and peptides—whatever they were—so it was hard to say he was wrong. But it wasn’t what schools taught. He had taken it for granted that the origins of the Animalis were common knowledge. The idea of an Ivanovich Machine was almost too much; how could one machine make all life so vulnerable?

“When you’re ready, dinner is waiting in the living room,” Grimshaw’s voice came in muffled through the door.

“Be right there.” Hank stretched and gave a big yawn. He looked down and noticed Jax’s bare feet, and the ripples around them. “Puddles? Aren’t you more of a Play Mat, cushioned guy? Hmm. Puddles. That doesn’t sound half bad.” Hank knelt and methodically untied his shoes, staring absently at the floor.

“Are you feeling alright? Being around Hodge and all. And being dragged out here because of me …” Jax said.

Hank stopped, but didn’t look at Jax.

“I should have just moved, followed the orders.” Jax said. “I’m sorry.”

Hank nodded. “Yeah, that was pretty dumb not to follow orders.” He stood up with his shoes in hand. “But then we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about this pyramid, hopefully stop some attacks.”

Jax relaxed when Hank turned to face him. He wasn’t upset.

“I’m at least glad they sent you,” Hank said. “That’s why you joined the army, to be the white knight that saves everybody, right?”

“If I can do it without screwing it all up.”

“Don’t worry about Hodge. He’s like a big dog, and I can handle a big dumb dog. If it was a bull, though …” He glared.

Hank went to the door and opened it. Grimshaw stood before the opening, wearing a new outfit with a flowery apron over the top, smiling as big as ever.

“It certainly smells good,” Hank said.

The diner was surprisingly normal, knowing that it had been Hodge who had prepared it. A little table had risen from the floor in the living room area and was set neatly with dinnerware, folded napkins, and a potted flower in the center. Hank eagerly took seconds, and finished off two glasses of strawberry milk. Jax was still working on his plate of stir fry when Grimshaw brought out a plate of lemon tarts. She announced it as a breakfast treat, now that they were entering Port Hedland’s time zone. Jax abandoned the stir fry and took two tarts.

Hank and Jax excused themselves while eating their tarts, retreating back to the cabin to go over the mission plans. There was to be a lot of communication, with Hank as the spinal cord for the information coming from each of the units up to the captain. Hank had already given recommendations for where each of the units should land and traverse to, where they could most effectively respond to progressing situations. Two of the units were being sent to probable sites that the first plane’s cargo could have been moved to. Jax and Hank were going to be landing by the rat plane they had been on, and were going to be backup for the transport unit.

The other units were all three-person groups. Gillian was heading a heavy-weapons unit, the tall staff sergeant was leading the transport unit, the third unit was infantry, and Hank was the information systems specialist. Jax almost laughed out loud when he saw that Felix and Maven had actually been assigned to the staff sergeant’s unit.

He sent a message to Felix:

The captain said you weren’t going on this mission. He doesn’t even know you exist. -Jax

“I’ve arranged for kangaroo transportation when we arrive, Jax,” Hank was saying.

Jax slid aside the message that Felix had sent back:

He doesn’t want the others to know I’m his favorite. -Felix

Then he looked up. “Kangaroos?”