It brought the discussion to an instant halt. Everybody looked to her.
She looked uncomfortable. "It's a… a matter of ballast. Keeping a ship like this aloft is a constant juggling act of ballast versus helium. We're reaching the end of our operating range. We have to drop the rest of our monitors and pull out no later than noon tomorrow."
She was lying.
When the Bosch had been refitted, her operational range had been expanded to twenty-one days. She carried additional helium in her tanks to keep her aloft for a week beyond that. Something was wrong.
Dwan Grodin saw it too. Her face went momentarily blank while she searched her augmented memory; when she came back, her features worked in confusion. She didn't want to argue with her commanding officer, but she knew that there was a discrepancy between what General Tirelli had said and the operational parameters of the mission.
Some of the others sensed it too. Shreiber. "This is political, isn't it? We're being ordered out, aren't we?"
Lizard ignored her. "We'll be going out through Colombia. We can't go over the Andes. So we'll follow them northward, up through Venezuela, and from there back to Panama."
Again, that had to be a lie. I'd studied the same maps. Those mountains were a wall to an airship this size. We couldn't get high enough. There was no way we could get to the Pacific. What she was saying was that it wasn't safe for us to go back out through Brazil. Worse, there was something desperate about our situation.
"If we're going to go after those children," she added, "it has to be tonight."
"All right," said Siegel. "We'll go tonight. Let's try it this way-"
For half a second my fingers drummed on the table top. Then, without excusing myself, I pushed my chair back and stood.
Nobody noticed except Lizard. And Captain Harbaugh. And maybe Harry Sameshima. I exited quickly.
l stopped outside the door, waiting. Thinking. Putting one and one together.
The chill started in my groin, climbed up to my belly, froze the breath in my lungs, and came out as a gasp of, "Oh shit-how could we be so stupid!" I could hear my heart thudding in my chest like a kettle drum. I leaned against the wall with both hands and stared at my feet. I stretched upward and stared at the ceiling. I wanted to pound on the walls and scream-at myself, at the world, at all the people who'd planned this mission and missed the obvious. I held it in. I held it in as tightly as I could, waiting for-waiting for some sense of what was the right thing to do.
The door whooshed open behind me. I didn't look around. Someone put her hand on my shoulder. I looked up. Lizard. We studied each other without talking. She looked scared. I felt… detached. The fear still burned, but now it was burning in another person too. It wasn't all mine anymore.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"You had other things on your mind. More important things than this. I didn't want to distract you."
"I wish you had."
"I'm sorry," she said softly. "We knew they were going to try to sabotage the mission. We thought we'd neutralized them. We still don't know what they did. Jim-we need to keep this quiet. We don't want to panic anybody."
"It isn't sabotage," I said. "You're looking in the wrong place."
"Huh?" She didn't get it.
Fear raised my voice. "It's the stingflies!"
Lizard was skeptical. "Those stupid little bugs?" Skepticism became incredulity.
"The camouflage worked too well-" Once again, the adrenaline chill exploded. My voice got louder. "They think the Bosch is a worm! Go up to the skydeck. They're all over the skin! Stinging! Biting their way in! By now there must be a million pinhole leaks in the gasbags."
I thought that would have shredded the last of her composure. Instead, she caught her breath-"Oh, my God"-and slipped immediately into control mode. "Why didn't you tell me-?"
"I just realized it myself! If you'd told me about the helium loss sooner-" I stopped myself in mid-word. I held up both hands in a gesture of disarmament. "Never mind. This isn't about blame. We have a real problem here. We've got to tell Captain Harbaugh-"
"Tell Captain Harbaugh what?" The skipper of the airship came storming out of the conference room, Sameshima behind her. The door remained open. White faces stared out. "What the hell is going on?" she demanded. "We can hear you all over the ship."
"Stingflies," Lizard said unhappily.
"What-?"
"Chtorran insects," I said. "They bite. They sting. They're mosquitoes the size of gnats. They've been biting their way into the skin of the airship. They think it's a giant worm. They want to lay their eggs. Or whatever it is they do. Once inside, they land on the gasbags. The red light filtering through the outer skin makes them react like they're still on the body of a worm. So they bite again. They keep biting until they find warm worm flesh. Only there isn't any. They're getting inside the gasbags, there's no oxygen, and they're dying there. But each one leaves a pinhole. That's how you're losing helium. Probably the tops of all the gasbags are shredded by now. You won't see anything, the holes are too small. But check the bottoms of the bags, you'll find dead flies. Pretty soon you won't be able to replace the gas fast enough. We're sinking."
Captain Harbaugh didn't want to believe me. Sameshima already did.
The nightmare was loose aboard the airship.
At the time of this writing, remote probes have extensively explored two mandala nests: the Colorado infestation that was destroyed by two nuclear devices, and the western Canadian infestation. The latter infestation was probed both before and after its destruction by assorted fire, freeze, and short-life radiation weapons.
Although it is probably too soon to say with absolute certainty, it is likely that the same patterns of construction observed in these two nests will also obtain in nests still to be explored; it is on that basis that this discussion is founded.
The dome-like structures that were originally identified as Chtorran nests are in fact only the surface entrances to the underground cities of the gastropedes. Wide, corridors circle downward from the entrances; there are always at least two per entrance. Later, as the surface nest is rebuilt to accommodate a larger subterranean nest beneath, there will be several main channels leading down into the body of the settlement.
Regardless of whether the main channels circle clockwise or counterclockwise, branching corridors always spiral off in opposite directions, so the structure of the underground colony resembles a set of bedsprings.
Centered within each set of bedsprings may be found a wide variety of chambers and apartments, each with its own specific use. Many of the rooms are used for storage; others function as reservoirs for various fluids within the nest: water, waste, and a honey-like secretion; some of the rooms are obviously meant to be used as living quarters or nesting zones, while other chambers appear to be either incubation chambers or feeding areas-or both.
Some of the rooms have unusual structures, and their purposes are not yet clear; for example, what is the purpose of the small chamber at the bottom of a vertical tunnel? Should a gastropede crawl into such a room, it would be unable to get out again-and in fact, the desiccated bodies of small worms have been found in several of these chambers.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)