The Omega Project (28 page)

EACH EPISODE OF NEURAL CAVITATION LEAVES A SIGNATURE TRACE IN THE MIDBRAIN AND FRONTAL CORTEX. THE FIRST SIGNATURE TRACE OCCURRED JUST BEFORE ROBERT EISENBRAUN WAS REVIVED.

Wait. If that’s true, then Oscar would have had to have been inside
Oceanus
just after I woke up.

CORRECT. IT WAS OSCAR WHO FREED ROBERT EISENBRAUN FROM THE CRYOGENIC POD.

You’re wrong. The staircase collapsed on my pod, that’s what freed me.

INCORRECT. THE ANGLE, WEIGHT, AND RATE OF DESCENT WERE INSUFFICIENT TO HAVE GENERATED THE FORCES NECESSARY TO CRACK OPEN THE CRYOGENIC POD. OSCAR FREED ROBERT EISENBRAUN.

I had a million questions, but Dharma was the priority, her breathing erratic. Turning to Oscar, I extended my hand to the cephaloped—who hesitated before taking it in one of its suckers.

My friend is dying. Please … whatever you did to fix me … fix her.

The squid released my hand and fled the chamber.

OSCAR REFUSES.

So I gathered. Why?

HUMAN FEMALES KILLED OSCAR’S THREE MATES.

Christ …
I checked Dharma’s pulse. Her heartbeat was as unstable as her breathing, her pupils dilated and unresponsive. With Oscar as her only hope, I gathered the naked female in my arms and exited the chamber.

The cephaloped was long gone.

I followed the corridor to the next open stateroom, then stopped to drag a wool blanket from a pile of mildewed belongings and wrapped Dharma in the quilt … then froze when I heard a terrifying sound coming from down the hall.

The bee colony had infested the galley. I could hear their low-pitched, agitated
buzzzzzzzz,
their numbers too frightening to imagine.

I backed away as quietly and quickly as possible, then turned and sprinted down the circular hall, clutching Dharma to my chest as I heard the swarm enter the corridor to give chase.

ABE simultaneously led me to the ladder and instructed me how to reposition Dharma so we could both fit down the chute. Gripping the warm metal, I stole a quick glance down the corridor … saw the dark cloud moving toward me, and more or less slid thirty feet down the ladder to the lower level.

I landed in a heap, Dharma on top of me. Above, the bees gave me a few precious seconds to regain my feet before they flooded the chute in pursuit.

Perhaps I could have made it to the egress chamber had I not been lugging a hundred twenty pounds of dead weight, or if we had not closed the hatch to prevent unwanted “guests” from tracking us into
Oceanus,
but my annoying bio-chip assured me there was a point-zero-five chance of accessing the chamber ahead of the swarm with the girl, and a forty-six percent chance if I dropped her carcass as bait and escaped alone.

How do you tell your own brain to fuck off?

I reached the egress chamber hatch, allowing Dharma to slide down my chest as I gripped the steel wheel in both hands and twisted it counterclockwise. Sweat was pouring down my face as the entire lower level reverberated like a power generator, my muscles stiffening in anticipation of an unfathomable déjà vu …
Are ten million bee stings as bad as ten million ant bites?

When the stings didn’t come, I reached blindly for Dharma, turning to face a sea of bees so dense they occupied every square centimeter of air—save for a slim boundary of space directly behind me where Oscar now stood, the cephaloped expelling violent breaths from its breathing tube.

Bees do not have ears; instead they use their legs and antennae to detect sound through the back-and-forth reverberations of air molecules. That they detected the pan flute–like disturbance there was no doubt; that they interpreted the sound as a conflicting directive leading to food would be explained to me later by ABE.

For now, the only things that mattered were the chamber hatch, which I yanked open, Dharma, who I dragged inside, and Oscar, who squeezed in after us even as he slammed the vault door closed, sealing us in.

Releasing Dharma, I bent over, gasping. “Thanks, pal.”

Refusing my hand—and another attempt to convince him to help Dharma, Oscar entered the escape chamber and was gone.

Exhausted, I lay down on the tiled floor and stared at the flickering recessed lighting. ABE had logically concluded that Oscar had freed me from my cryogenic tomb. If that were true, then there was more at play here than our attempted symbiotic relationship … a line of inquiry that placed a spotlight on a questionable assumption: Was twelve million years a suitable amount of time for a sea creature to adapt to land?

I stared at the beautiful nude before me. In contrast to my American huntress, Dharma was small and supple, her body taut from a mastery of yoga.

“Well, Jason Sloan, at least your programming is getting more interesting.”

Spreading out the blanket, I bundled Dharma up, then carried her into the next chamber. Oscar was gone, having left the escape hatch open. Ducking through, I stepped outside, then placed the girl on the ground in order to reseal
Oceanus
behind me.

The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the cooling sand. Slinging Dharma over my right shoulder, I followed Oscar’s tracks, four zigzagging impressions resembling a serpent’s trail leading southeast. Despite the flat landscape, the cephaloped was nowhere in sight, a fact that quickened my step.

I felt the vibrations before—a distant pounding—like a quarter horse approaching the first turn. As I quickened my pace the sound became louder, the source clearly locked in on my presence. I spun around to see what my Omega dream had conjured up this time.

“Holy shit.”

Words cannot adequately describe the animal chasing me. ABE told me it was seventy-five feet, but even half a mile away all I could see was the crocodile’s head, which was green over yellow and as big and wide as my first-grade elementary school. Four powerful legs churned the sand into dust clouds, which were beaten aside by its prodigious tail, the appendage lashing back and forth behind its thickly scaled frame.

Panic summoned ABE, and the bio-chip unleashed an ocean of adrenaline that momentarily rendered me a world-class sprinter, perhaps delaying the inevitable death-in-one-bite scenario by a few meaningless seconds.

And then I saw what appeared to be a second monster, two hundred yards ahead and to my right, a titanic female oozing postal truck–size eggs into a shallow crater it had excavated using its hindquarters.

MALE CROCODILIAN CONTACT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. RUN TO THE FEMALE CROCODILE.

“Vanilla sway!”

THE MALE CROCODILIAN IS TRACKING ROBERT EISENBRAUN BY SCENT. DIVERT TO THE NEST.

Registering the earth-shaking wallops behind me, I cut hard to my right, heading straight for the mountain of olive-green scales that was seeding its young before me.

I was sixty yards away when the female’s head turned in my direction.

Fifty yards from her nest when Mama Croc spotted the approaching male.

At thirty yards I froze, and all hell broke loose.

Smaller than her male counterpart, the hissing female passed within ten feet of stomping me into vanilla swirl as she instinctively charged the perceived threat to her young. Dropping to the ground to avoid her swishing thirty-foot tail, I watched her bound away, then slid down the near side of the steep hole into the nest.

EISENBRAUN, LEAVE THE NEST!

But you just said—

LEAVE THE NEST! GET TO THE CLIFFS.

A bone-chilling male reptilian roar met the female’s sizzling hot
hiss
as I dragged Dharma over a landscape of gooey ivory boulders and out the other side of the nest. I was so winded I could barely inhale, and my leg muscles felt like liquid lead.

Staggering twenty paces from the hole, I collapsed with Dharma in my arms, completely spent.

Having circled the nest, the male croc now stood between us and the cliffs, its raised head towering three stories, its golden-yellow eyes glistening in the late afternoon sun. Its jaws remained half open and motionless; its upper fangs, set below the snout, were twisted outside the mouth like a briar patch, each tooth as long as my arm. No longer downwind of us, the monster seemed unsure of our location, and though the tip of its twelve-foot skull remained poised less than one of its body lengths away, ABE warned me not to move, that its vision was sensitive to motion.

The megacroc snorted the air, each inhalation accompanied by a hollow gurgling growl. I remained frozen in place, even as my eyes tracked something hovering in the air behind the creature—
a glint of sunlight?

To my horror, Dharma expelled a low wail and it was Game Over.

The croc roared, its massive head turning toward us—as a shrill sound blotted out my hearing and caused the beast to tremble. As I watched in stunned confusion, the croc’s stomach expanded outward, its torso bloating, as if it were inflating … and then sixty tons of crocodilian insides suddenly, unexplainably, burst out of either side of its belly, the sonic detonation splattering internal organs across the beach.

What happened next? To be honest, I’m not sure. I was dazed, lying in blood and innards, my head buzzing, my hearing replaced with an incessant ringing. In the silent aftermath, a cavalry of tentacles snaked around my body and Dharma’s waist and suddenly we were bounding across the open beach, heading for the cliffs.

I must have lost consciousness, for when I reopened my eyes we were standing before the boulders marking the base of the rise. Oscar appeared to be engaging its breathing organ, tooting the device like a cephalopod ram’s horn, though I heard only my shrill silence.

In my delirium, I saw two unusually shaped rocks set in a natural recess animate into a whirlwind of tentacles. The three camouflaged cephalopeds quickly untangled, allowing Oscar to pass, my guardian squid hauling Dharma and me through the narrow cave entrance and into the darkness.

24

To be great is to go on. To go on to be far. To be far is to return.

—L
AO
T
ZU
,
Tao Te Ching

A howling wind blasted me full in the face, the cold air clearing my head. We were rising higher in a pitch-dark cave along what seemed to be a fairly steep incline. I could feel the cephaloped’s torso heaving as it strained to tow the two of us up the rocky path, the animal slowing as we progressed through the damp unseen elevation.

My ears were still ringing painfully from the blast.

The terrestrial squid stopped climbing. Cupping a handlike sucker pad over each one of my ears, Oscar applied suction to the ear canals—gentle oscillations that reduced the inflammation and calmed the eardrums. When the cephaloped removed its appendages the tinnitus was gone, sound returning in the form of rushing water.

After another hundred feet Oscar released me. We had reached the summit, the passage ahead now leveled off, the blanket of darkness yielding to a faint backlit archway marking the end of a short tunnel. Too tired to object, I allowed the land squid to lead me, my eyes widening in amazement as we approached the opening.

It was a subterranean chamber, so vast it could have enclosed a major city, its cavernous walls rivaling those of the Grand Canyon. Stalagmites as tall as skyscrapers were dwarfed by a ceiling drenched in the humidity of its own cloud bank. Petrified calcite enclosed either side of this titanic geological orifice, the grooved rock face bathed in emerald-green light originating from a torrent of river that split the vast underworld like a glowing serpent. Illuminated by the agitation of its triboluminescence mineral bed, the waterway seemed to run forever.

Standing by the banks of the rushing water, dwarfed on either side by the shimmering blue-green walls, I shared a perspective the Israelites must have experienced when Moses had parted the Red Sea.

And still, I had seen nothing.

We followed a rocky trail that paralleled the river, the echo of rushing water reverberating along the canyon walls. Bound aloft in one of Oscar’s tentacles, I heard Dharma stirring. Despite the cephaloped’s earlier refusal to help, the creature’s prolonged physical contact with the human female appeared to be healing her damaged nervous system.

ABE, what made Oscar change his mind about touching Dharma?

OSCAR WAS FORCED TO ESTABLISH PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH DHARMA AFTER THE CROCODILIAN ATTACK.

The croc …
In my delirium, I had completely forgotten about the monster and its mysterious demise. Searching for answers, I held out my hand to my gangly companion, hoping to reestablish communication.

After a moment, a tentacle reached out, suctioning my forearm.

Oscar, how did that croc … that four-legged monster with the big teeth die?

ABE took several moments before responding.

OSCAR’S RESPONSE TRANSLATES POORLY. THE HUMAN EQUIVALENT WOULD BE CLOSEST TO “BLESSED HEAVENLY ONES WHO NURTURE.”

What does that mean? Who are these Blessed Heavenly Ones? What are they?

OSCAR HAS NO COMPREHENSION AS TO WHAT THE ENTITY IS.

Are these Blessed Ones responsible for killing that super croc?

YES. THEY ARE ALSO THE ONES THAT INSTRUCTED OSCAR TO FREE ROBERT EISENBRAUN.

*   *   *

Our destination was upstream. We followed the river for miles, from its more sedentary low course to its white-water middle course, the flow picking up noticeably as we progressed along on our journey to God knows where. Every so often a silverfish the size of a piranha would flit out of the water onto the bank, its indigo-blue fins whirling like a bumblebee’s wings as it fed on crawling insects.

ABE calculated that we were 2,970 feet below the surface, heading in a southeasterly direction. After nearly two hours of walking, I no longer cared, having barely eaten in the last eighteen hours. And yet as hungry as I was, I would have traded a four-course meal for a king-size bed and some aspirin.