Fragment (19 page)

Spiger
Pantherocaris rex
(
after
Binswanger-Duckworth and Echevarría,
Expeditionary Reports of the Trident Expedition
, vol 2: 1-180)

“It sounded like gunshots!”

“You didn’t see it?” she asked.

“No.”

“What was it?” Quentin said.

She propped herself up on her elbows and swung her legs down over the edge of the bunk. Her hearing was still weak and tinny—her ears and head throbbed. “A nightmare.”

“Are you all right?”

She laughed nervously. “I’m glad NASA built this thing,” she said loudly over the continuing din in her ears.

She slid down and hugged Andy and hid her face on his shoulder for a quick, controlled sob, and Andy obliged, squaring his narrow shoulders and looking back at Quentin, protectively.

The NASA biologist was studying the deep gouges in the surface of the window. “Whatever it was, I hope it doesn’t come back. It must have spotted you through the roof like a lemon meringue pie at a lunch counter, Nell.”

“God damn it, Quentin,” Andy scolded.

“Sorry.”

“Captain, the
Enterprise
is hailing us,” said Samir El-Ashwah on the bridge of the
Trident.

“Put it on speaker. Yes,
Enterprise?”
Captain Sol delicately glued a window frame onto the back of the Spanish galleon model he had set up on his chart table.

“Captain, this is Lieutenant Commander Eason of the
Enterprise.
We have a request from the highest levels for a professional cameraman to do some work on the island. Conditions will be safe, he’ll be in some sort of NASA vehicle. Do you have anyone who might fit the bill?”

“What highest level,
Enterprise
, just out of curiosity?”

“Uh, that would be POTUS, the President of the United States, sir.”

Captain Sol widened his eyes at Samir and Warburton. “I think we may be able to accommodate you,
Enterprise.”
He pulled off his reading glasses. “Let me get back to you in the next ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes will work, Captain. Thank you!”

“Oh crap,” Captain Sol said, with a sidelong look at Samir. He reached for the ship’s intercom. “Cynthea and Zero, please report to the bridge.”

“I gotta see this,” Warburton said.

Minutes later, Cynthea crashed through the door. Zero sauntered in after her.

“The Navy asked for a cameraman to go ashore,” the captain told them. “Apparently, the President of the United States himself has authorized it. Are you interested, Zero?”

“Zero!” Cynthea cheered.

Zero narrowed his eyes at Cynthea.

“Oh no!” Cynthea exclaimed. “Just watch, Captain, now he’s going to say no. He’s been saying no all week!”

“Eh, Cynthea? Are you involved with this?” The captain frowned.

“What are the details?” said Zero.

“I don’t know. You’ll be in something NASA built, they said.” Captain Sol looked at Cynthea grumpily.

But Zero smiled at her. “Does your last offer still stand?”

“Of course…” She blushed.

Zero’s grin widened. “OK, baby.”

Cynthea avoided Captain Sol’s scrutinizing eye as she raced past him to give Zero a huge hug.

The mongoose sat so still it might have been a stuffed specimen in a diorama. Only its nostrils moved as it sniffed the air.

It found no familiar scents, but caught nauseating whiffs of sulfur in the air. Strange stimuli baffled its instincts, and its ringed tail, whiskers, and ears twitched in unison.

The animal was fitted with a black nylon harness. Mounted on top was a Crittercam, a device invented by Greg Marshall for the National Geographic Society. At the end of a curving black tube, a pencil-wide camera lens peered over the mammal’s supple shoulders.

The tiny camera beamed a real-time image from a Starburst candy-sized titanium-cased transmitter on the animal’s back. Its signal was good for a maximum range of about five hundred meters.

The grizzled and faintly striped fur of the mammal shimmered in the diffused light as it crept up over a tree branch that seemed to be coated in scales like a reptile.

The mongoose kept lifting its head on its long, flexible neck, temporarily blocking the tiny camera’s view. Flinching at every unfamiliar noise, it surveyed its surroundings.

The mongoose’s reputation for astonishing athletic ability is well earned, though the popular belief that it is immune to the poison of the cobra—its archenemy as depicted in Kipling’s famous children’s story—shortchanges its prowess. In fact, the mongoose relies solely on its lightning-fast reflexes to prevail over the world’s deadliest snake. Likewise, the supposed close
contest between the mongoose and the cobra, perpetuated by Kipling’s tale, was a myth. It wasn’t really a contest at all.

The average mongoose approaches a cobra with almost playful zeal. Their confrontation is a pitiful thing to behold. The mammal toys with the venerated reptile, easily dodging its strikes with eye-blurring leaps, taunting it with its jerking ringed tail as it times its fatal assault. So precise is its coordination on that final strike that the mongoose counts on biting the cobra’s head
behind
the hood to deliver the coup de grâce. Mongooses have even been known to pin their victims down, rip out their fangs, and taunt their toothless quarry, like a cat would a mouse, before condescending to feed on their still-coiling prey.

Deadly snakes, of course, are not the only victims of the fearless mammal. Birds, rodents, reptiles, and fruit all find their way to its stomach. Its keen sense of smell can even locate scorpions underground, a mongoose delicacy.

It froze now. Its senses were on fire with foreign cues, its instincts confused by conflicting danger signs. Spooked by the motion of the unfamiliar foliage, the mongoose leaped from the branch to land on the feather-strewn ground.

A buzzing rushed toward it. The mammal sniffed the air, switching its tail, eyes darting from side to side as it attempted to locate the source. It jumped, spinning onto its back in the air like a high-diver performing a double twist.

A whining bug zipped toward its head; the mongoose caught it with both front paws as it landed on its hind feet.

The feisty bug bit the mongoose’s nose with surprising violence, and the mongoose hissed, wrestling it ferociously and kicking up feathers on the forest floor.

The insect’s power baffled the mongoose. Its pinching knife-edged legs managed to cut off two of the mongoose’s toes as the mammal bit the bug nearly in half through a crunchy exoskeleton.

Even as the mongoose chewed its carapace, the bug fought, leaking blue blood over the mammal’s chin. The strange, tangy
taste reminded the mongoose of pill bugs, and it spat the bug out as it scanned the trees.

A flying swarm swooped down through the branches. The mongoose leaped, barely avoiding an animal its own size that had narrowly misjudged its trajectory.

When the mongoose hit the ground, it ran.

It slalomed around tree trunks and under logs to lose its pursuers.

In the parting mist of a ravine, a cobralike shape reared up, and the mongoose sprang sideways.

It switched its tail, going into attack mode as a familiar sight finally engaged its scrambled instincts.

When the mongoose lunged at the snake-shape, something streaked in from its right.

It tried a midair twist, but a pulse of agony jackknifed it forward as something snipped off its tail.

The snarling mammal hit the ground and spun to face its attacker, its back raised and the bleeding stub of its tail twitching. It faced its opponent—a Henders rat.

The bulbous eyes of the rat swept back and forth on diagonal stalks. Long, crowded crystalline fangs filled its wide mouth and colors pulsed in stripes around its jaws. White crab claws on its lower jaw fed the still-curling tail of the mongoose into its mouth, bite by bite as though into a sink disposal. It trained both eyes on the trembling mongoose and spat out the tip of its tail. Then it closed its lips over its mouthful of fangs and blew a piercing whistle from two nostrils on top of its round head.

The mongoose hissed, stepping back as the high-frequency noise pierced its eardrums. In shock from pain, the mongoose froze, its senses overloaded. It tried to focus on its opponent, whose face rippled with dazzling stripes of color.

The velvet-furred rat held its thick tail curled under its body, tucked between its four legs. A sharp cleat hooked down on the tip of its tail like a scorpion’s stinger, gripping the ground.

The rat’s second brain toggled the eyes on its back, ready to direct the creature’s leaps with the hind legs and the “tail,” which could
launch the animal twenty feet. It rose up on its four legs and extended long knife-edged arms at the mongoose, as though sensing it with antennae, the claws on its lower jaw extending in anticipation.

The mongoose preempted its strike and lunged at it, catching the back of the rat’s neck in its teeth.

The mongoose bit down and gave a vicious jerk of its head to snap the rat’s neck—but there were no bones in its neck to snap. It gave a few more furious shakes as the rat blew another whistling screech. The mongoose bit down again and again before it released the mortally wounded rat and sensed the wave of animals approaching. Panicked, it spun and leaped away, tipped off balance without its tail.

Another Henders rat sailed through the air, tackling the mammal with its knife-edged arms.

It clamped the mongoose’s hind legs with its own and twisted it to the ground. The mongoose’s supple back rippled and curled like a whip as it writhed in a death grip with its attacker, kicking up more dust and feathers.

But the invertebrate was more flexible. The claws on either side of the rat’s wide jaws grabbed the mongoose’s belly and its teeth bit deep.

Attracted by the snarling fracas, a riot of other creatures arrived. They plunged into the shrieking ball of carnage on the forest floor.

The Crittercam’s lens was suddenly sprayed blue and red.

The transmission went dead.

The mongoose had survived two minutes and nineteen seconds.

Moans of disappointment filled all three still-operating sections of StatLab as the monitors went dark.

Presidential envoy Hamilton Pound stared in frustration out the windows of Section Four, which was farthest from the jungle and highest up the slope of green fields that rose to the island’s high rim.

Pound thought the inside of StatLab resembled the interior of a large Gulfstream jet jammed with workstations, monitors, and specimen-viewing chambers, each attended by grim-faced scientists and technicians. All seemed very depressed by what they had just witnessed.

“Damn,” Dr. Cato said. The slender scientist had neatly trimmed white hair and wore a peach-colored Caltech polo shirt. The usually keen, youthful sparkle in his gray eyes was absent now. The fate of the mongoose had filled him with dread. “OK—scratch mongoose off the list, Nell.”

Nell nodded and shot him an ominous look.

For his part, Hamilton Pound was confused by what he had just seen. And a little dizzy, too. He wore a rumpled, sweat-stained Brooks Brothers shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a loosened blue-and-red Hermès tie around his unbuttoned collar. His receding hair was slicked back with sweat. He was suffering from a bout of dysentery as his system battled a microbial invasion, and he swigged thirstily from a bottle of Mylanta.

As Special Assistant to the President, Ham Pound had been dispatched on this fact-finding mission by POTUS himself. It was his first opportunity for a solo performance, and at thirty-two he knew it was an impressive milestone in what had already been referred to in the
Washington Post
as a “meteoric diplomatic career.” Unfortunately, his own illness, the weather, and canceled flights due to equipment failures had cost him three days en route.

And it was just his luck that yesterday two Sea Wolf attack subs had detected and confronted a Chinese sub only fifty nautical miles north of Henders Island. The incident had precipitated a dangerous diplomatic standoff, and the President wasn’t happy about it. The Chinese had backed down, for now. But the ball was firmly in Pound’s hands, and he had to score.

“So much for Crittercams,” Nell sighed, patting Dr. Cato’s shoulder.

Dr. Cato looked troubled. This phase of the investigation, wherein common invasive species would be tested against Henders species, had been designated “Operation Mongoose.”

The Navy brass needed to have a name for this task, apparently, even though the whole operation was top secret. Cato was the one who suggested “Operation Mongoose,” since mongooses were notorious island conquerors. Now that an actual mongoose had met such a swift and terrible fate, however, he wasn’t so comfortable with the name.

Nell reached for the newly arrived diplomat’s hand. “Welcome to our home away from home, Mr. Pound. Sorry, but we were a little busy when you came in, as you can see.”

“Nice to be here.” Pound nodded, only half-facetiously, as he replaced the cap on his Mylanta and shook Nell’s hand. “Call me Ham.”

Both Nell and Dr. Cato balked at the suggestion.

“Nell is one of only two survivors of the original landing, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato explained, “and a brilliant former student of mine. She’s proven to be one of our most valuable on-site project leaders. I don’t think she’s slept a minute since the first section of the lab touched down nine days ago. Have you, Nell?”

“Nice to meet you,” Pound said, annoyed by the academic niceties.

“Have a look at these,” Nell said.

The woman was all business, Pound decided.
Good.

She presented a brightly lit viewing chamber. Inside was what looked like a collection of buttons.

“Those are disk-ants, as Nell here, who discovered them, calls them,” Dr. Cato explained, looking over Pound’s shoulder.

Nell zoomed in with an overhead camera to show a top view of one of the disks on a monitor over the specimen chamber. The one she focused on was waxy-white with a bruisy blue in the center. The “faceup” side of the disk-ant looked like a pie sliced into five pieces. At the center, a shark-toothed mouth grinned across the seams of two slices. On either side of it were dark eyes anyone could take for buttonholes.