‘What do you know about Fallen Angel?’
Gaby leaned out of bed to take a cigarette from the packet on the wicker bedside table.
‘It’s a plan to capture, isolate and analyse a biological package before it releases its cargo.’
‘How do you know this?’
She breathed smoke into the glowing apex of the canopy.
‘It’s a security issue. Between me and my sources. So where did the angel fall?’
‘Zaire. Eastern Zaire; place called Rutshuru. We knew one was coming – we’d had the thing on deep-space tracking for several weeks – but not where it was coming to: you never can be sure because of variations in the aero-braked descent.’
‘Except that it’s always within plus or minus one-and-a-half degrees latitude,’ Gaby said.
‘We picked a number of locations based on hit probabilities that covered a radius of two flying hours; that way when the package began descent we could get our mobile units to the target. As it was, it came down within half an hour of the base at Kilembe in western Uganda. All our mobile units relocated to Goma where the UN left an airfield and relief base from the Rwandan civil war. The helicopters were airborne before the thing hit the ground. The Sikorskys picked the thing up before it was even cool. They called me in Nairobi and laid on the Tupolev. I was the only passenger. Mach 1.8, all for myself. A guy could get used to this.’
‘I got there just as they were bringing in the thing in the inert gas pod. The theory was that the memes, the fullerene-machines, whatever the hell you want to call them, would not be able to replicate in a chemically inactive atmosphere. The labs were all set up – the engineers had been busting their buns – floodlights, power, the inflatable domes where the researchers would be working on the capsule. You’ve seen glove boxes where you put your hand through a wall to work in a biologically hazardous environment. We took it a stage further; we had complete suits connected to the outside by concertina tunnels.
‘The team suited up – they were French, a good crew, I knew some of them from Tsavo and Tinga Tinga – and went in. They opened the capsule with a diamond blade cutter – you’ve seen schematics, you know what the packages look like.’
Like things I used to find washed up on the shore, Gaby thought. Egg-purses, seed-cases, or the recursive chambers and vaults of mollusc shells. But cast up from a deeper and darker sea than the one that breaks around my childhood.
‘They took it apart like a medical operation – or defusing a bomb. That may be a better analogy. Each step very slow, very careful, very deliberate, all explained and recorded and documented before they moved on to the next. They spent an hour describing the process of cutting the outer heat-skin and peeling it back: analysis showed it be a kind of composite polymer wood with certain attributes of a flexible ceramic. Perfect ablation material. As they found it, the carapace was in an early stage of decay; it must become porous to allow the contents to escape.
‘Think of an orange – those elongated fluid-filled cells packed into segments – and you’ll have some idea of the interior of the package. But dark red, almost crimson. A particularly brutal blood orange. It was getting light by the time they removed the first cell for sampling. Each was about the length of my forefinger and terminated in a complex tangle of light-sensitive fibres.’
‘Nerve endings?’ Gaby asked. ‘Like a brain, is that what you’re implying?’
‘Seed and brain cells combined. The pod can program its own contents, change the specifications of the memes to manufacture different forms.’
‘No Bug-Eyed Monsters saying “Take me to your leader”.’
‘We’d done scans, taken X-rays, gamma-flash photographs. The structure was uniform throughout. We weren’t expecting any Bug-Eyed Monsters. For which I’m very glad; I was the nearest thing to a leader there.
‘I don’t know how it happened.’ A green lizard ran over the wall and clung, head down, under the window ledge. ‘Maybe the inert atmosphere wasn’t as pure as we’d thought, or the engineers rushed the job. First thing I knew that something was wrong was Dominique Ferjac thrashing around in her suit like a fish on a line. She must have sprung a leak, oxygen atmosphere had blown out into the inert chamber and the fullerenes had started to reproduce. The suit was like cheese-cloth in seconds. I should have pulled the plug then but the others wanted to get as many samples as they could inert-bagged and cycled through the lock to the outside. They didn’t know it would blow like that. None of us knew it would blow like that. We should have guessed; the thing needs to spread its spores as far and fast as possible. While we got Dominique out of the suit and into the decontam tank, air had been leaking into the inert atmosphere and when it hit a certain percentage, the capsule went off like a geyser. Like fucking Old Faithful. The bubble went red. It caught the team: we could hear them on the radio shouting for us to get them out, but everything was coming apart around us. The last thing we heard before we lost communications and the bubble collapsed was someone shouting
‘I almost went in there to get them. I was at the seal door on the outer bubble when one of the army officers pulled a gun on me and told me that if I broke the contamination seal he would shoot me on the spot. It was fucking chaos, Gaby. Fucking chaos, I still can’t believe everything came apart so fast. Somehow the army got the area cleared before the bubble blew, but we still lost the team, one of the Sikorskys and God knows how much equipment. Have you ever seen a grass fire, Gaby, that moves faster than a man can run?’
‘Down on Strangford Lough the tide is like that across the flats. I once saw it outrun a poor bastard dog.’ Gaby watched the smoke coil upward from her nostrils. ‘I can still see the paws, trying to push against the current, and its nose, held up out of the water. I remember its owner, frantic, but there was nothing she could do.’
‘It moved like that tide,’ Shepard said. ‘It moved like fire. Like fire, it consumed what it touched and left everything changed behind it. God alone knows how I made it to the Tupolev – I was last on. Last on. They pulled the door behind me and took off. Twenty seconds after we started to roll, the steps went. It was that close. From the air I could see the whole airfield; it was like one of those satellite photographs in miniature: this circle of hideous colour a mile wide stamped on the green hill country.’
‘You all right, Shepard?’
‘I’m all right. Now.’ He took the cigarette from Gaby’s lips and placed it between his own. Gaby’s heart kicked with sudden strange eroticism. ‘I thought I’d given these things up years ago. You never do really quit, do you? As soon as we regrouped back at Kilembe I sent a skinsuit team back for survivors. We got the team – they’re still decontaminating at Kilembe. But Dominique died, Gaby. She’s dead. The filtration and pumping system on her tank went down. She suffocated in there, Gaby. Alone. Trapped in the dark. Couldn’t do a thing about it.’
‘You’re not to blame, Shepard.’
‘I was senior officer, and all I did was run around flapping my arms and shouting while Dominique Ferjac died. I didn’t know what to do, Gaby. Something happened that I hadn’t prepared for and I couldn’t make up an answer on the spot.’
‘Who does know what to do, Shepard? It’s an alien world out there, it doesn’t obey our rules and laws or follow our management policies or research strategies.’
‘It doesn’t make me feel any better.’
‘It isn’t meant to. It’s a token of solidarity, from one person up to the eyes in shit to another. Because, as you said, at least it’s guaranteed fresh shit every day. And by the way, these things give you cancer.’ Gaby took back the cigarette, smoked it down to the dog end and stubbed it out on the floor. She rolled against Shepard, moved her hand over his flank in the way he liked so much he could barely stand it. ‘If that didn’t make you feel better, how about this?’
He smiled.
‘A little.’
‘How about this then?’ She did a thing he liked even more, that he could just bear.
‘Better.’
‘This?’ She moved her mouth down to do the thing he liked so much it almost killed him.
‘Best,’ he moaned, and took her long hair in his hand and pulled her head gently up to look at him. ‘One last thing. Your friend, Peter Werther. He was right. The Chaga has known us for a very long time. In the sample we managed to get out from the Rutshuru package, we found human genes. Or rather, proto-human genes. They differ from ours in a couple of small but significant chromosomes. We’ve done geneline analyses and generational
