Two others shook their heads and unslung their rifles, holding them out as if to keep them clean should they throw up.
Candle looked ready to turn to stone. Carson backed away from the troops, pushing the safety off his pistol.
“Hysteria,” Delbarco said in disbelief. “There’s nothing here!”
“Aerosol,” I said. “There could be a mist in the air throughout the ship. Bacteria, phages . . . We’ve been breathing it for some time now. Right into our lungs.”
Delbarco looked as if she had just been kicked in the stomach. “Goddammit,” she said. She raised her rifle again. “Get up off your knees. We need to move forward.”
Breaker put his hand on the barrel. She jerked it aside and glared at him.
“Fuck it,” Breaker said.
“Let’s go,” Ben whispered to me. “We don’t want to be here.” He took me by the arm and we walked away. One of the prone Marines looked up, saw our departure, and reached for his rifle.
“Ma’am,” he said.
Delbarco ignored him. She had locked eyes with Breaker.
“We are being influenced,” Breaker said. “We have no choice but to head back to the boat.”
“I do not agree,” Delbarco said.
“I am in command.”
“And I will not abandon this mission because of a bucket of pus, Goddammit!”
“Move it,” Ben ordered me under his breath.
“Put down your weapon, Agent Delbarco,” Breaker ordered.
“The entire country is in jeopardy here!”
“Put down your gun.”
I looked over my shoulder. Breaker had a reasonable, even a pleasant look on his face. He held out his hand, cleared his throat.
Delbarco opened fire. Breaker slammed back against a bulkhead and bullets whinged and sighed around the deck. One of the ricochets took a Marine in the nose. He bent backwards and his weapon discharged. I felt the wind as a round buzzed past my ear.
Ben had been right. Trying to take Lemuria and confront Maxim Golokhov was indeed like squeezing a giant zit. We had not progressed as far as we had hoped with our elixir. But then, Ben had known, I suppose I had known; anyone could have guessed. Golokhov had been studying his microbes for over seventy years.
We ran to the escalator and took the moving steps three at a time.
Ben and I split up when we encountered a group of four Marines, all sporting blue armbands, using light fixtures for target practice.
“Chickenshit!” one of them shouted. Ben went right, down a corridor, and I took a narrow stairwell.
I’m working to remember in some linear sequence what happened on board Lemuria in the next few hours. I’d like to tell the truth, but even at the time, truth was a rare commodity, all too easily squandered. I was better off than some I saw, but in fifteen or twenty minutes, I was sweating like a glass of ice water in a swamp. At my heart I felt glacial, but my skin was hot and damp, and my breath smelled—so I thought—like the fumes off a bucket of hot tar.
I felt happy enough, but not so happy I could laugh at my condition.
At first I wasn’t afraid. I had a kind of wanderlust. I was like an ant hosting a parasite, looking for my bird. I just didn’t know what my bird looked like.
I did know that a troop of Marines, their uniforms soaked and stinking, mingling with kitchen crew in chef’s caps and goop-stained whites, was not my bird. They were to be avoided. They were happily shooting up a huge hanging sculpture in a high-ceilinged bar area, dodging the long, falling glass stilettos.
Red and green and blue shards covered the oak dance floor. One Marine had not dodged fast enough. A long blue knife of glass had entered his upper thigh and pinned him to the wood. He looked down in dismay at his predicament, then laughed with the rest of them, twisting in hobbled jerks, straining at the flesh of his calf like a closely staked dog. “Anyone want to bet how long before it breaks?” he called out.
Gunfire and happy shouting rose from a tropical garden below another skylight. Marines and Coast Guard had taken sides and were using each other for target practice. Points were being awarded, and even as I listened, bursts of rifle fire reduced the number of voices. Best to avoid that area entirely. I pushed forward and across the ship to the starboard side of A deck, I think.
I made my way down a carpeted passageway with granite walls studded with gold fasteners. It was beautiful, but my head was clearing and I felt a little anxious. I was thinking about piecework and chopper and regulus. Perhaps my brother had not been as good as everyone had thought, Lissa included. Maybe these alterations had unwittingly primed us for the defenses on Lemuria.
Or perhaps he had known that they would protect me, with my gene modifications . . . but would not protect the others.
I came out on a balcony (I hadn’t the foggiest idea what the nautical term was) pushing out below a huge jutting wing that I presumed was part of the bridge. That positioned me just forward of Aristos.
The balcony overlooked the starboard side of the bow, a long sloping hill spaced with lines of windows, gleaming like a knife blade against the gray sea. God, it was getting late. The eastern sky was dark, and the western was suffused with the last of a flaming sunset. How time had darted and distorted. I stood there for a while, enjoying the fresh air, then decided I would not try to escape. I would find Goncourt’s hospital for myself.
I did have a few questions to ask of the Master. I would deliver my respects in person, then surrender. History had won. That was it, really, in a nutshell. Maxim Golokhov was the twentieth century. He was my history. And he had definitely won this war, a war I had never wanted to fight in the first place.
Just as I turned to go back inside, I heard a rapid succession of cracks, like popcorn in a steel drum. I looked aft and saw several columns of smoke, black and worried by sea breezes, rising from the starboard side. Another puff joined them, and more cracks. They might have been unchambered rounds going off in a bag of clips, some Marine’s body cooking. Or firecrackers. I wasn’t a soldier, and I did not want to know.
I encountered Ben standing by himself near a bank of pay phones. He was just hanging up, rubbing his chin’s stubble and smiling like a kid with a full sack of chocolate bars. He looked surprised to see me.
“Hey,” I said.
He puzzled for a moment. “I thought we’d made our farewells.”
