Instinct (2010) (13 page)

The awkwardness was cut short by the arrival of Major Webster.

‘I thought it would be useful to have the major around when we go into the surveillance room to check on the renegade nest,’ said Bishop. ‘He can tell you anything that he and his team have already tried and perhaps give you his opinion on whatever measures you might suggest.’ He then beckoned to Harry Merchant to join them. ‘And I think Harry’s read would also be useful. He knows what we can do here, so between the four of us we should work out whatever solutions there might be.’

Harry removed his safety equipment and stood beside the others before Bishop introduced him to the newcomer.

‘Harry Merchant, Laura Trent.’ He shook her hand a little too hard.

‘Dr Trent, of course, from the British Entomological Association. I found your paper on the effects of photoperiods and host quality on reproduction most enlightening.’

‘Thank you,’ said Laura, disarmed.

‘I know it must all be a bit much at the moment and, without wanting to sound condescending, things are a little different around here, but we’ll do our best to bring you up to speed.’

‘Shall we?’ said Bishop, gesturing towards a locked door just beyond the barracks. Webster’s palm print opened it to reveal an extensive internal security room. There were three banks of monitors, each covering a different part of the complex. A thin black microphone stuck out in front of the three chairs, currently occupied by an exhausted Garrett, Van Arenn and Mills. On Bishop’s instructions for backup, Webster had roused them from their bunks, to a chorus of bitter cursing. The soldiers shared security duties when they were not actively involved in clean-up, but they all hated spending more time than necessary down here, especially when they were just an hour into a day-long sleep. There was hardly anything that actually required their attention, but they were employed and paid, so they were often given tasks that veered very close to the definition of pointless. As ex-army grunts they were used to nine parts
boredom against one of extreme excitement, but it didn’t make the boring times any more welcome.

Another issue was their current attitude towards Bishop. The deaths of Roach and Martin were fresh in their minds, so when the man they held responsible walked into the room, they were not inclined to hide their disdain. Bishop caught their sour looks the moment he walked through the door.

‘Uh, on second thoughts, perhaps this conversation need not concern your troops, Major Webster.’ The three soldiers turned to their commanding officer.

‘OK, you three: stand down, but be ready to return at 1300 hours.’ A welcome reprieve for the soldiers,
who immediately made their way back to collapse on to their bunks.

‘Now let’s take a look at Lab 23.’ Webster was already in the process of tuning as many of the monitors as possible to transmit what was happening in the area around the lab. Screen by screen, an entire wall was given to increasingly comprehensive glimpses of the corridor, the door and the view from outside the lab. The final three screens showed the inside, and a clear view of the wasps. Laura remained deeply disturbed by the footage Bishop had shown her, but this time, there was no Dr Heath, so she found herself able to watch the insects with a degree of professional detachment. Although the wasps were indeed the size of bricks, with wings as big as snowshoes, they moved with astonishing speed, flitting and hovering with the agility of their smaller counterparts.

She was also reacting as a human being, particularly when she saw the images from the final camera. They revealed an arrangement of gnawed bones which lay on the floor in roughly the poses in which David Heath, Frank Roach and Hayley Martin must have died: arms trying to cover skulls, knees tucked up into ribs and jaws wide open in the form of the grotesque screams they tried to give before the paralysis seeped into their bloodstreams. It was all too easy to imagine their last moments; knowing that death was inevitable but still praying for the horror to end.

The light colour of the bones was offset by the dark cloud-shaped stain that lay beneath them. The blood
was mottled with clots and gore, as well as the results of bowels and bladders loosened through fear. Laura noted that there were no clothes to be seen, then looked up to the deep, wide nest and realized where they had gone.

Back on the floor, each bone was pitted like something a dog had spent a few days chewing, with the shadows of hundreds of scrapings darkening the white. The determined savagery this suggested sent a hard shudder through Laura.

Suddenly one of the wasps flew up to the camera, knocking it sideways and scratching the lens with its jaws. Everyone instinctively jerked backwards before remembering there was no threat and returning to their positions. As it dragged its mandibles across the glass they could see right into its mouth. It was like a machine, grinding and swallowing even when there was no food.

‘It’s probably attracted to the whirring of the camera, but that will give you an idea of the kind of aggression we’re dealing with,’ said Webster.

‘By any chance, is that the one you thought of as the leader, Mr Bishop?’ asked Laura. Webster looked surprised, then interested in how Bishop was going to answer this. He had not heard this theory and was not happy to be left uninformed.

‘Uh … impossible to say, really,’ said Bishop, without taking his eyes off the main screen. ‘They all look pretty much alike to me.’ He then took a piece of paper and sketched a layout of the room for Laura.

‘It can get a little abstract looking at the same view
from six different angles. The door is here on the left. In the opposite corner is the computer with the nest above it. The … um … bones are mainly in this central area and the other computers are on the right-hand side.’

The wasps were agitated. Laura thought it might be because of the cameras, but then she spotted something on the ground in the corner of one of the shots.

‘Can you move the cameras?’ she asked. Webster responded by pressing a button and pushing a joystick, giving a panned view of the whole room. This immediately attracted the wasps, which then attacked the lens and body, causing it to judder violently.

‘That one.’ Laura pointed to a dark shape in the corner of one of the monitors. ‘Can you point it more over there and zoom in?’ They had to wait for the wasps to tire of attacking the camera and move away to reveal its view.

‘Is that … ?’ began Harry.

‘I think it must be,’ confirmed Laura. Now they were all looking at two of the wasps, their abdomens partly obscured by the edge of a table, fighting over something thin, fibrous, black and yellow.

‘Must be what?’ snapped Bishop.

‘They’re cannibalizing,’ said Laura, staring at the leg sections and wing fibres the wasps were passing back through their mandibles.

‘Why would they do that?’ Bishop asked.

‘They need to eat,’ said Harry quietly.

‘I assume you know that several normal species of
wasp live off insects. I suppose these wasps count each other as such. Other insects, such as woodlice, will eat their own, but I’ve never known this to happen with wasps. I suppose that’s because, in the open, wasps can always find something other than themselves to consume, no matter how hungry they get, but here … Well, like Mr Merchant said, they need to eat.’

As the meal neared its conclusion, a larger wasp landed between the two and seemed to scare them off with its greater aggression and status. With the outer parts of its jaw, it grabbed the scraps and took them back to the nest.

Laura frowned. ‘There may be another reason why they are doing this. I can only guess at their behavioural make-up, and we wouldn’t normally see this in wasps, but we may be watching survival of the fittest in action. It looks like they’re honing the quality of the swarm by removing the weakest and feeding the strongest. If there is a leader, a queen if you will, then she’ll be getting fed by the others.’

‘Well, at least it’s reducing their number,’ remarked Bishop.

Harry turned to Laura to see if she was considering the same possibility he was. ‘Not necessarily.’ Bishop looked at Harry first with incomprehension, then with fear.

‘You don’t mean they’re … breeding?’ Harry looked at Laura again, then she turned to Bishop.

‘Possibly,’ she said.

‘No, not possibly. Impossibly. I mean, first off they’re
all female, but even if we could cause same-sex reproduction, the one absolute in all the experimentation we have undertaken to this point, the one hard, fast, unbreakable rule is that they must be unable to breed with each other. Even David would not have been so irresponsible as to create anything capable of self-procreation.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Harry. ‘We have no idea what these wasps are capable of. We have no idea if they are a product of David’s intentions or something that went wrong. Perhaps he tried to achieve one effect but happened upon another. It’s a regular occurrence in my labs. Until we get hold of that book’ – Harry pointed to a notebook wedged between the computer monitor and the hard drive – ‘we will not be able to deal with them effectively. And, by the way, it’s only a matter of time before the wasps realize that David’s notes would make excellent nesting material, then we’re really in trouble.’

‘Good lord,’ said Bishop, ‘this situation can actually get worse.’

‘Much worse,’ added Laura.

‘OK, we need a plan, and we’re not going to leave this room until we’ve got one,’ said Bishop. ‘All suggestions welcome because, at this precise moment, we have zip.’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ said Laura. ‘Shut off the heat. Shut it off now. You have no choice.’

‘I can’t sanction the destruction of all the work in this laboratory on the off-chance that it will bring this
situation to an end. For all we know these wasps have been mutated to deal with colder temperatures.’

‘Mr Bishop. You. Have. No. Choice.’ Laura could not believe further persuasion was required.

‘There must be another way. We have an obligation to exhaust all other avenues before we try something so potentially disastrous. I don’t need to remind anyone here that we are required to provide these wasps for military use. It will be bad enough telling the Pentagon we were unable to contain one isolated problem in the facility, but if we explain that our action was something other than a last resort …’

‘Will it be worse than what they’re going to do?’ asked Harry as he watched a wasp tearing the head off one of its sisters before using its mandibles to chew up the meat and pass it back through its mouth.

‘Mr Bishop,’ said Laura, ‘these wasps will only get more dangerous, and quickly by the looks of things. You will still have the research and knowledge. This place can start again.’ Bishop flashed a look to Webster, who pretended not to notice.

‘
If
the cold works.’ He paused and thought. ‘No, I am not prepared to allow the end of this project and facility to happen on that basis. How long have they been in there?’

‘From surveillance records, around two weeks,’ said Webster.

‘OK, then another hour or two won’t make much difference. What about poison?’

‘We’ve tried the conventional combinations of
acetamprid, pymetrozine and novaluron, but without much effect. We could up the dose; fill the room with chemicals. It just means that, with the current ventilation system, it might be difficult to enter for maybe a day, or we’d have to go in with masks.’

Bishop was delighted that Webster was even entertaining the possibility of sending more of his squad in. He had thought such a suggestion would be met with steadfast refusal. For now, though, in the absence of any further ideas, they may as well try pumping the place with insecticide.

‘OK, that’s the default idea. Major Webster, until we get something better, you can assume that what you have just outlined will be our primary course.’

Webster went to the barracks to put Bishop’s orders into action, and Harry continued to look at the nest while Bishop escorted Laura back to his office.

She tried not to let it show, but the last few minutes had concerned her a great deal.

‘Mr Bishop, I’d like to get out of here.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to take Andrew and wait for the next flight on the surface.’

‘Dr Trent, you can’t leave us now. Please. We’ve barely begun to explore our options.’

‘Yes, well, that’s all fine, but I’d rather not be down here while you do the exploring.’

‘You’re not afraid, surely?’

‘Well, not afraid exactly, but I just want to err on the side of caution.’

‘Dr Trent, let me assure you that we will have a great deal of notice before anything threatens the area outside that one lab. And even if anything did happen, we have security measures that could stop a million of those wasps. This entire facility is fully functioning, most of the staff have no idea what is happening in that lab. That’s how contained this situation is.’ He could see her wavering.

‘You’re here because you have the ability to find the best solution to what we’re facing. Without your expertise, we have a much smaller chance of reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Please, Dr Trent, if not for me, then for the others. Don’t desert us now. Give it just a couple more hours.’

She didn’t have enough information to counter him without seeming callous and selfish. And he could be right: perhaps there was little immediate danger. Could she really refuse to give a bit more help? Turn her back on all the people she had just met, when helping them could be so easy?

‘Another hour, Mr Bishop. Another hour and we’re gone.’

‘How are you doing?’ Laura asked Andrew gently. Despite the great things Andrew had heard about
Seven
from his classmates, he thought it got a bit wordy, so after an hour he switched to
Terminator 2
. His mum had let him watch it before, so he knew there would be no difficulties when she returned to find him sitting in front of it.

‘OK. How long do you think we’re going to be here?’

Laura crouched down beside Andrew and rubbed his shoulder. ‘Not long.’