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“Not sure,” he said. They couldn’t swim out the way they’d come in. Not against the current, and not when half the tunnel had probably collapsed from the explosion.
They kept moving forward, looking for anything that suggested an exit. Navigating the maze was far more difficult without Priya to guide them with the lights.
After several wrong turns they came to the end of the tunnel andpushed through a door that led them out into the sunlight. They were a thousand yards down from the dock, but a boat was already heading toward them. As it pulled up, Paul all but jumped off the boat to embrace his wife.
Kurt brought Priya on board and Kai was immediately drawn to her side. She dropped down next to her, brushing the few strands of hair that remained off of Priya’s face.
Chantel was there, leading. The other crewmen from theIsabellawere there as well, manning various stations. “Anyone else?” Chantel asked.
“No,” Kurt said.
She waved to the helmsman, and they moved off the dock. “Where to?”
“The other side of the island.”
The boat moved off the beach and out into the bay.
Chapter 70
In the days after the battle, the world turned its attention toward the little island in the Seychelles. At Dr. Pascal’s urging theAkesomade its way to the island at top speed. Its arrival was greeted with concern and suspicion, but once Five stepped off the boat and began vouching for the kindness of the crew and medical staff, that suspicion faded. Dr. Pascal and her team were soon delivering medical treatment to wounded who’d been on both sides of the struggle.
Priya and the most badly injured clones were taken aboard, while the others were treated on the island. Kai went on board, too, remaining at Priya’s side, waiting and hoping she’d regain consciousness.
Paul, Gamay, Chantel, and the crew of theIsabellawere treated and cared for as well. Of this group, Gamay was the only one Dr. Pascal found herself concerned with. Physically, she was fine, despite the surgery that Vaughn and TAU had put her through. But mentally she remained withdrawn and quiet, a far cry from the normally cheerful woman they all knew.
She met with Kai often, checked on Priya throughout the day and night, and spent a great deal of time at the ship’s rail, staring outacross the bay. Her behavior wasn’t completely surprising, all things considered, but it concerned everyone. Paul stayed close to her throughout, his strong but quiet nature providing excellent support while allowing her to process what she had been through.
Due to international fears regarding the fertility virus, the island was quarantined to outside visitors, other than the medical personnel on theAkesoand certain computer experts who arrived in hopes of retrieving information from TAU’s memory core, but it was like picking through the bones of a digital dinosaur. Little could be done on-site.
TAU’s optical and digital hard drives were airlifted off the island and taken to a lab in California, where they would be examined forensically one by one. The devices numbered in the thousands, but many had been burned and shattered, or overwritten by the viruses Max had unleashed inside TAU, and the vast majority of them had been corroded by the salt water that burst in from the ruptured cooling tunnels. Between the extensive damage and TAU’s encryption system, no one was expecting to find much of value.
In the meantime, a package arrived at the NUMA office building in Washington, dropped off by a delivery rider no older than the kid who’d brought Rudi his unwanted sandwich a week before.
The mail room didn’t know what to make of it and sent it up to Hiram Yaeger’s office. It was addressed to:My friend, Max.
Yaeger opened the package cautiously, discovering pages of medical notes, genetic coding, and other scientific information. He soon realized these were transcriptions of genetic research, most of which described the creation of the sea locusts, methods to speed up clone growth, and the genetic data on a novel pathogen labeledfertility virus x1.
A note read:
Sorry, Max,
I couldn’t get this to you directly without the risk of TAU taking it away as soon as it arrived. I logged into the Georgetown University server and created a student ID for myself. That allowed me to download the data, forward it to a printing service, and have a hard copy made that could be sent your way. Hopefully they did a thorough job.
Good luck,
Eve
At the bottom of the order page was an AI-generated photo of a young woman with dark curly hair, green eyes, and olive-colored skin. She wore glasses and offered a wry smile. The image was copied from a student ID bearing the equally fabricated name created by Priya’s program: Eve Gray.
The data Eve sent the world had provided a head start in creating a vaccine to fight against the fertility virus, but everyone was going to be happier if it never reached shore. Science teams from a dozen countries were tracking the approaching swarms. The size and extent of the larger swarms were breathtaking, and world leaders were considering the use of chemicals, poisons, oceans of burning petroleum products, explosives, and even nuclear weapons as the means to destroy the sea locusts before they made landfall.
While those discussions went around in circles, Kurt played a hunch he’d had ever since he’d seen the satellite photos showing the sea locusts traveling in perfectly straight lines.
Migrations in the ocean were still something of a mystery. Despite plenty of research, marine biologists still struggled to explain howwhales, sharks, and other species could navigate the featureless waters of the ocean and still get from place to place accurately.
The most widely accepted theories were that the animals detected and followed magnetic lines from the poles while also possessing an ability to detect the angle of the sun, or that they possessed some form of internal guidance that humanity had yet to find or understand.
But migrations tended to go back and forth along the same line, while Vaughn and TAU had shown the ability to guide their nightmarish creatures in any direction they wanted and to have them hold their courses through storms, thermoclines, and conflicting currents. This told Kurt something more was in play. Something simple and direct.