Jesus, MacCready told himself. It’s trying to communicate with us.
Yanni repeated the song again, and in Mac’s mind, at that moment, nothing else existed. He felt Yanni’s hand on his shoulder, motioning him to step aside with her, leaving a clear pathway to the door.
Without turning away from the bats, MacCready whispered, “Yanni, why—”
“There is no other way, Mac. If we want to live.”
MacCready nodded. I’m not crazy. It’s not just senseless animal song: It’s an understanding.
A moment later, there was a flutter of movement and a whisper of parchment, then the clatter of claws receded down the steel-walled companionway.
One bat remained.
The mother crouched in a forward launch position, sono-scanning the three humans.
Go!
Then, like the other draculae, it was gone, vanishing down the companionway like a specter, and leaving in her wake the unmistakable scent of gardenias.
CHAPTER 29
Profiles of the Future
The survival value of human intelligence has never been proved, and may in fact be more a liability than an asset. Once a species reaches a certain level of intelligence, it has a survival advantage until such point that it develops sufficient power to destroy itself and everything around it. And it may be, then, that it always does. The universe may be full of planets on which high intelligence at the high-technology level has not yet developed, and also full of planets bearing the ruins of high-technology civilizations that no longer exist.
—ISAAC ASIMOV, 1986
Nostromo Base
February 17, 1944
By the time Major Patrick Hendry arrived by seaplane the next morning, with a serious contingent of special ops boys, MacCready and his two friends were waiting to guide them in. The monorail and most of the compound’s buildings (what remained of them) were still gushing plumes of black smoke that mingled with the mists and rose above them.
As Hendry’s men spread across the base, the major pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his pack. He followed up by producing a pair of shot glasses.
“How’d you get in here so fast?” Mac asked.
Hendry smiled. “Air recon, reported that half of Brazil seemed to be on fire. I figured it was you.”
“Yeah, well, breaking things and killing people, setting shit on fire. That’s what we scientists are up to these days. Isn’t it?”
Hendry replied with a humorless laugh. “Mac, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, pouring a pair of stiff shots. “And speaking of which, we just heard from our boys back north. There were numerous sightings of an unnaturally bright meteor off the Virginia coast. It was heading south to north when it tore apart.”
“Let me guess, it was heading directly away from our position.”
“Quite a coincidence there, huh? Unofficially, they’re calling it a Foo Fighter.”
“And officially?” MacCready asked.
“A meteor.”
“What about casualties on the ground? Any word on whether this meteor dropped any bombs along its path?”
“None whatsoever,” Hendry responded, noting his friend’s unease. “An eyewitness said, ‘It simply flamed apart into a bouquet of bright sparks and disappeared over the ocean.’”
“A bouquet, huh? And what about the second rocket? Any more bouquets?”
“No . . . no word on that one. Intelligence thinks it was probably lost over the Atlantic as well.”
Mac shook his head. “That’s a stretch.”
“So maybe we got lucky this time.”
Hendry raised his shot glass.
MacCready hesitated, then lightly touched it with his own. “This time,” he said. “But judging from a Japanese sketchbook and the type of lab equipment they left behind, it’s pretty clear these guys figured out how to use pathogens in the draculae saliva to make a bioweapon.”
Hendry nodded. “Makes sense. And you know what I always say about wounded animals, right?”
Mac waved off the rather obvious dig. “Smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
As if on cue, Thorne approached the men, seeming either troubled or looking for trouble.
“Ah, the World-Famous Botanist, I presume,” Hendry said. “Would you care to join us in a toast to a job well done?”
Thorne flashed MacCready his best who-the-fuck-is-this-guy look then addressed the major: “Excuse me, bub, but last I heard, those rockets were heading down that track in one piece.”
“One of them went down off the coast of Virginia,” Hendry said quietly. “And that’s classified information, Mr. Thorne.”
“And the second one?”
Hendry paused. “Presumed lost.”
“In any event, I will hold off on the celebrating, thank you.” Thorne turned to his friend. “Mac, have you seen Yanni?”
Yet before Mac could scan the grounds, Yanni emerged out of the shifting mists—shadowy, as if she were a ghost.
“Hey, Yanni,” Mac called, “I wanna introduce you to our brand-new fr—”
Something in her expression stopped him.