Watermind (32 page)

Awgh!
She woke up coughing.

The downpour was swamping her boat. Hastily, she stuffed her instruments into a bin and used her Red Sox cap to bail water. Flashes of lightning revealed ragged whitecaps boiling across the river. She had no time to check for the colloid's plume.

Dead ahead, an ocean-going freighter emerged out of the night like a shining wet sea monster. It churned upstream, straight at her. A spotlight from another direction made her spin to see a towboat pushing a twenty-barge tow downstream. The two enormous vessels were signaling to
each other. They were going to pass, and they couldn't possibly see her small boat. She was caught in the middle.

She scrambled to the stern, reeled in her Lubell speakers, then pulled herself forward and lurched for the controls. In the darkness, she steered blindly for shore, and the Viper skipped across unseen waves. Just as another lightning flash showed her the riprap bank ahead, her boat collided with something heavy and hard, and she was jolted to the floor. Then the boat spun in a complete circle and heeled over dangerously. She grabbed for the steering yoke to keep from falling overboard.

At last, her careening boat righted, and the freighter's spotlight revealed what had happened. Her Viper was trapped in a colossal revolving eddy that had formed behind a wing dam. These small dams channelized current in the lower Mississippi, and this one had gaffed her like a fish hook.

Thousands of feet above her head, smoggy droplets bounced up and down through hot and cold layers of atmosphere, freezing, thawing, and refreezing, gathering mass. An icy hailstone struck her cheek, then another stung the back of her hand. As turbulent backwash shoved her against the rocks, she huddled on the cockpit floor, opened the bin, and shielded her instruments with her unzipped raincoat. The field finder showed energetic force lines radiating around her Viper's battery, her instruments, the freighter, the towboat, even a pair of channel buoys—but not the colloid. There was no trace of its comet plume. She had lost it.

Spotlights danced over her boat, and someone bawled through a megaphone. The next thing she knew, a crewman jumped into her flooded cockpit and forced her to stand. She couldn't hear his words in the drilling rain. He made her mount a ladder to board his vessel. The ladder bucked and reared, and when her foot slipped, a pair of hands reached down to steady her. On deck, the stranger enfolded her in a voluminous army-green poncho, and lightning showed his face. Roman Sacony.

“Idiot girl.”

They were aboard the Coast Guard's
Pilgrim.
Roman steered her into the shelter of the pilothouse, where they found half a dozen men standing in attitudes that suggested a recent argument. The smell of anger still charged the air. Testosterone. Adrenaline. Bitter pheromones. The liquid language stirred the hindbrains of everyone present.

CJ didn't recognized the officials who banded together around the chart table in the center of the small cabin. Peter Vaarveen and Dan Meir sat apart, near a computer workstation. Dan Meir gave her a friendly wave. In the forward section, a uniformed officer manned the controls, and everyone had a gas mask draped around his neck.

“Put this on.” Roman snugged a mask over her head and adjusted the buckles for a tight fit. Then he loosened it and let it dangle around her throat. “If you smell something sweet, like almonds or fruit, put it on immediately. Got it?”

She nodded. Under the poncho, her wet clothes made her tremble, although her head felt hot and achy. Roman cleared a bench and made her sit down, and Peter Vaarveen put a mug of steaming coffee in her hands.

“I lost it,” she said bleakly. “I lost the field.”

“Don't worry. You helped us find it again. Vaarveen, stay with her.” Roman squeezed her shoulder, then stepped away to join the men at the chart table.

Peter sat beside her and grinned. “Let me guess. You have questions.”

While she drank the coffee, he explained how, after they traced her location, they used the Coast Guard's military satellites to find the cold spot again. They'd been monitoring it for the past hour. Peter didn't know or care how Roman secured the Coast Guard's aid. What excited him was the discovery that the colloid had gone supercool.

“Like ice fog dissolved in the water.” He ruffled his sun-bleached hair. “Fucking chameleon.”

He told her the colloid was oozing along the riverbed at a temperature of 20°F, but it was still liquid. And its volume had tripled to forty-two fluid tons. Its blurry plume stretched over three hundred yards, and behind it trailed an ephemeral wake of ultraclear water.

“The damn thing's eating barge cargo and drinking chemicals from the river, then pissing a trail of clean H
₂
O. On top of that, it's using slave algae to store sugar.” Peter wiped his thick greasy glasses.

“You have samples?” CJ came fully awake.

“Come on, I'll show you.” He activated the computer workstation and downloaded the latest satellite image. The colloid's size shocked her.

While Peter explained about the runaway photosynthesis, she scrolled rapidly through his notes. “What's he planning to do with all that stored energy?”

“I can't tell you that but”—Peter winked at her—“I know how it reproduces.”

“How—” CJ's mouth fell open.

Peter grinned and opened his personal laptop. The liquid crystal display showed an enlarged image captured from the SE microscope, and before Peter could intervene, Rick Jarmond peeked over his shoulder. “Whoa, that's creepy. Bacteria cells, huh? What are they doing?”

“Yeah, Peter, what are they doing?” CJ crowded between the two young men to see the image.

Peter crossed his arms. Rick Jarmond had proven too savvy to bluff. For better or worse, they would have to tread this deep shit together. “All right, the goop is algae juice, known in the trade as proplastid. And the bacteria is
Deinococcus radiodurans.
”

“Ha.” A smile of recognition spread across Rick's face.

Peter sighed and nodded.
Deinococcus radiodurans
was the genetically engineered bacteria he'd recommended to clean up Quimicron's toluene spill. They'd dumped a truckload of the stuff into Devil's Swamp. When Rick gave him a knowing wink, Peter could only shrug.

On the laptop, he enlarged one particular bacterium and clicked through a fast-forward sequence of images. Inside the cell's watery globe, a galaxy of the usual paraspeckles, gems, and cajal bodies floated in cytoplasm. But it was the lumpy swollen nucleus that drew their attention—or rather, the jagged crystalline shard to which it was giving birth.

Hard-edged, splintery, the shard seemed completely out of place in its juicy organic womb. As the sequence unfolded, CJ watched a distinct ninety-degree corner take shape. Soon the shard grew into a flat square wafer that distended its progenitor cell. When the membrane ruptured and spilled its cellular sap, the wafer emerged in full view, a layercake of sheer metals and silicon, laced with something that looked like—

“Circuitry?” said Rick.

“It's a microchip,” CJ breathed.

“Too wild even for your dizzy imagination, huh Reilly?” Peter smirked, enjoying their surprise. “This bacteria cell is the perfect nano-factory. See, it's replicating a microchip one atom at a time.”

Rick stroked his almost invisible goatee. “Who the heck programmed a
Deinococcus
to make a semiconductor chip?”

“You can do amazing things with genetic engineering.” Peter scratched peeling skin from his sunburned arms. “Think of a cell as an information system, with DNA as software. The cell follows simple rules laid down in its genes, and genes are easy to reconfigure.”

Rick scowled. “You make living things sound like machines.”

“Well yeah. Our bodies are totally mechanistic at the cellular level.” Peter happily blinked his white-rimmed eyes. “We invented computers. Where do you think we got the model from?”

Rick twisted his mouth and clicked his ballpoint pen. He wanted to say something about souls, but Peter carried on. “What's really cool is the coding language. Microchips
are binary, and living cells use RNA base sequences. Those are two completely different alphabets.”

“So that means”—CJ shivered with excitement—“in order to communicate with these bacteria, our colloid had to learn a new language.”

Peter mimed a kiss at the newborn chip emerging from its nuclear womb. “The colloid's not just communicating, Reilly. It's farming and slaughtering the little fuckers.”

On screen, the chip bobbed free while its watery living cell ruptured and bled. CJ twisted her hair round and round her little finger.

“How many of these
Deinococci
did you find?” Rick said.

Peter gestured toward a stack of green pickle buckets leaning against the wall, with coils of wet rope dangling from the handles. Beneath them, water pooled on the floor. Peter smirked at Rick. “Brother, I found millions.”

“Where is he?” CJ said, meaning the colloid. “We should dive and get a fresh sample.”

“Reilly, your screws are loose.” Peter grinned and pointed down. “It's right below us.”

 

Friday, March 18

3:18
AM

 

Roman pondered the serpentine blue line that looped back and forth across the laminated map of southern Louisiana. Around him, the men on the bridge snarled at each other, and his ear loop vibrated against his temple. Elaine Guidry had finally supplied him with a mobile headset, but he no longer listened to its whine. His attorney was explaining the advantages of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Lawsuits were piling up like snowdrifts. He should file soon, the lawyer said. For protection. For bankruptcy.

“Nunca!”
Roman bellowed, causing the others to stare.

He turned away and growled at the lawyer. He would not give in. He would fight. The colloid was approaching the town of Plaquemine, and he would stop it before it got there. He stuffed the ear loop in his pocket and dry-swallowed another red-and-black capsule.

Moments earlier, he had divulged the full truth about the colloid to Ebbs and Jarmond. He did it to gain their help, but still, he doubted whether they believed him. A floating nebula of computer trash linked in a WiFi network, who would call that sane? The men's faces had knotted and changed color when he described how the cohesive data-processing blur had coagulated from trash in Devil's Swamp.

Even the old captain's eyes had hazed when Peter showed them pictures. With furrowed brows, they watched the Jell-O skeins churn. Roman said the colloid was electrically active, but it had no center or trunk line, no heart or brain, nothing you could shoot or stab in one blow. It was like the Internet, he said, or like the ocean. There was nothing solid to aim at. “Tear a billion holes, and you won't slow it down,” he told them. Their only chance was to trap the entire plume where it couldn't move, then fry its microchips.

“A water-borne computer.” Rick Jarmond couldn't stop blinking. He rubbed his eyes so much that one of his contact lenses rolled up under his eyelid. “But Rome, how can it move so fast?”

Peter intervened. “How does a school of fish move? Or a weather system? Or the stock market?”

“Like a mindless mob,” Ebbs rumbled.

“Not mindless. A school of fish can be smart,” said Dan Meir. “Take your Jacks and Pompanos. They school up for feeding and self-defense, and I've seen as many as thirty together—”

CJ stopped listening. They were skirting a vital point: How did the colloid
move
at all? How did it steer in and
out of the current, speed up, slow down, rise, and sink? She thought the electromagnetism was maneuvering the dissolved iron. But the men cared more about tactics than scientific theories.

Rick Jarmond wanted to evacuate the entire river corridor from Plaquemine to New Orleans. He kept trying to settle his contact. He feared the whole river would be blanketed with lethal gas, and he was threatening to call the governor. Captain Ebbs chewed his white mustache. Dan Meir chewed his cigar.

It was the old argument: Raise an alarm and create panic, or keep mum and deal with the situation quietly—as if there was anything quiet about this floating circus.

By now, over a dozen vessels were chasing the
Chausseur
and
Pilgrim
downstream. The EPA had sent a Zodiac, the Corps of Engineers had its Boston Whaler
Gallant,
and the Iberville Parish sheriff's patrol followed in a speedboat. Behind them trailed a regatta of spectators: Channel 2, Channel 17, plus a hodgepodge of environmental watchdogs and off-duty fishermen. The
Refuerzo
and Quimicron's two small speedboats brought up the rear. Roman had ordered Rory Godchaux to keep the menagerie corralled.

“First things first, we gotta move it away from population centers,” said Meir. “We don't want any more people hurt.”

Rick Jarmond pranced nervously around the chart table. “Hey, why don't we divert it out to sea through the Bonnet Carré Spillway?”

He pronounced the two French words like a girl's name, “Bonnie Carrie.” On the map, he pointed to a narrow strip of marshland where the Mississippi curved close to Lake Pontchartrain, just north of New Orleans. With boyish pride, he explained how the Corps of Engineers built the spillway back in the 1930s to divert Mississippi floodwaters through Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Do you have a brain?” Roman sneered at the junior G-man. “You want to let it loose in the
ocean
?”

“That's practically within sight of New Orleans. Too many people live around there,” said Meir.

“What about Manchac Point?” Captain Ebbs thumbed the map.

Ebbs stood a head taller than anyone else in the pilothouse, and his bass voice outmatched the noise of the rain that still pummeled their roof. Bending over the map, he jabbed his finger at a horseshoe curve in the river labeled “Manchac Point.” “Inside this bend, there's a flooded field in between the river and the levee. We'll drive the damned thing in there.”