Invasive (31 page)

It's almost no surprise when Cole shows up with bad news. His eyes are wide as moons and his voice has gone hoarse—in part from yelling at men to do their jobs and in part from breathing in that stuff outside. He says, “You gotta see this.”

Hollis stands up. He moves in a way that feels disconnected from himself, like he's a passenger inside his own body.

Outside, at first he doesn't see it. The haze of burning pesticide has made everything gauzy, and it hurts his eyes and his throat, but it's fading with the wind coming in off the sea. Soon, though, something flits by him. Something small.

Then another. And another.

Dozens. Hundreds. Hollis watches the little flying things flit past. Some of them are flying through the haze just fine. Others are dropping to the ground onto their backs, tiny legs kicking the air as the pyrethroid fog kills them.

“The hell are these things?” Cole asks. He holds up his hand, and one lands on the back of it before flying away.

“Wasps, maybe,” Hollis says.
Shit, now we got a wasp problem, too?

But then a new voice behind them says, with no small amount of wonder, “It's a nuptial flight.” It's Jeff, the entomologist. He coughs into his fist.

“What?” Cole asks him. “Speak English.”

“They're ants. This is their nuptial flight. Queens looking to mate and settle down to make new colonies.”

Horror strikes at Hollis's heart. He starts swatting at the air, but the entomologist catches his arm. “No. Don't attack. They won't bite if they don't feel threatened. Ants on a nuptial flight are only interested in mating. They're not aggressive, only defensive.”

Keep it together,
Hollis thinks, even as the air around him is suffused with flying things. He moves slowly toward Cole, who looks panic-stricken, then says: “We get inside, then order an evacuation.
Now.
”

T
he sound of the ocean is the sound of breathing. The rise and fall of waves, the inhale-exhale of oxygen. The lift of the sea mirroring the swell of one's chest.

The raft bobs and dips. Kit pukes over the side again.

Hannah pulls back from the edge of the craft—an eight-person emergency life raft, yellow as a goldfinch—and goes to Kit's side. She pats the woman's back as she dry heaves into the waves.

Behind them, the storm is a wretched, dark thing. But ahead: blue skies and feathery clouds. “The storm is turning north,” Einar says.

“Good” is the only response Hannah can muster.

“I saw you watching it. I saw the fear in your eyes. I seek to reassure you.”

The fear isn't just in my eyes,
she thinks. It's everywhere. All parts of her, every cell, sings a song of dread.

Ray says, “I don't think now's the time for reassurance. We're floating in the middle of the fucking ocean. We don't know where we are.”

“We know exactly where we are,” Hannah says. She holds up the GPS—it came with the survival kit moored to the underside of the raft. It is both a beacon locator and an admittedly primitive GPS system. But it's enough.

They're about fifty miles off Kauai. The gear will come in helpful: fishing kit, medical kit, sunscreen, flares, flashlights, hand-crank radio, strobe light, signal mirror, and so on. Some of this would have come in handy on Kolohe—the radio especially, even though
it's one-way. Hannah knows her way around survival gear, and the raft is a high-end one. It's built for long hauls at sea. It covers over in storms. It's built so it won't overturn even in the most violent churn. It came with a pair of oars, too. Not that anybody's rowing yet.

For now, they sit. And float. Every time Hannah closes her eyes, she flashes back—

Rotor cutting the sea—

Water rushing up and rushing in—

Her head, bleeding plumes of red—

She swims, reaching for someone's hand—

They sink—

A flurry of bubbles—

Caught in the downward drag of the helicopter, and Hannah struggles against it—

Someone nearby, struggling with something yellow and bright—

She swims over, dizzy, sick, screaming inside—

Together she and Ray get it inflated—

Einar says, “We should all be happy that we are alive. Life is a gift.”

“Tell that to the dead,” Barry says. His face is gray with something worse than seasickness: it's gone pale with despair. “Nancy. Captain Dan.
Buffy.
”

“We need to get to Kauai,” Hannah says. The time to mourn will come, but it isn't now. “We need to move, so that means we need to row.”

“Kauai?” Kit says, peeling herself away from the edge of the raft. She wipes spit bubbles from her saggy lower lip. “We can't go there. You said—”

“I know. Hollis said the island might be compromised.”

“Those ants . . .” Kit's eyes pinch shut, hard. “We can't go there if the ants are there. We have to go somewhere safe. One of the other islands.”

“The other islands are too far,” Hannah snaps. She hears it in her own voice: the anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty. She takes a deep
breath and tries again. “Oahu is another eighty miles easy from the eastern side of Kauai, and we'll be coming up on the west.”

“We could go to Niihau—”

“It's too close to Kauai. It could be compromised. Besides, we need to handle this. We have information. Nobody there knows what we know. It's up to us to help. We have a responsibility.”

Kit is about to say something, but Einar interjects: “Hannah is right. We are obligated. And I believe in the team here. I believe we can make a difference. If these creatures make it to the other islands, it is likely they will make it to the mainland. And if they make it to the mainland—imagine that.”

Silence all around. Grim faces stare.

Eventually Ray sniffs loudly and says, “Then we better get rowing.”

Hannah does the calculations as best as she can in her head: a rowboat at a good clip will travel eight to ten miles an hour. This isn't that. They're a big, clumsy life raft in the ocean, where the current does not favor them. And they're using manpower that is pushed to its limit and near exhausted. They're traveling three miles an hour, tops.

Fifty miles out: given no other hiccups, and given their maintaining that speed (which is unlikely), they'll get to Kauai in seventeen hours. Impatience threatens to choke her. The longer they're away, the more the island will fall to disaster. The more people will die. And the chance that the ants will find their way off that island only increases.

Barry says, “Maybe they'll send someone. We have the GPS locator.”

“We can't count on that,” Hannah says. “Even if they send anyone, who's to say they'll find us? The GPS locator assumes someone is looking for this particular device.” She looks to Einar. “Should we assume that?”

“I confess,” he says, “I never established much of a protocol in that way, no. I was not even aware that the locator was part of this raft. If anyone knows to be looking for it, I don't know who they are.”

“So,” she says, putting her back into rowing. “We keep on.”

Einar is next to her, also rowing. He leans toward her. “I've been thinking. We lost Ajay's notes in the crash. But we are not without recourse. Will is still out there.”

“He is. And I aim to find him.”

“As do I. Once we have his notes, I can counter this plague of ants. We can work to undo the damage he has done. Much as we did with the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito, we will breed a second Myrmidon ant—this one a terminator species. We can wipe them out in a generation.”

“It won't be that easy,” Barry protests. “Ants are eusocial. Their life cycle is complicated.”

“Mosquitoes are one-and-done,” Kit adds. She and Barry are huddled together. “Male and female mate, female lays eggs, the genes are carried on. Ants are different. Every
species
of ant is a little different. Usually, mating flights establish new colonies with virginal queens. One of those queens mates with ants of other nests and goes off to lay the first eggs of her new colony. Problem is, queens don't mate constantly. They store the sperm and can produce a thousand eggs a day until they die—and many queens can live five, even ten years. That's why ants suck to get rid of. You can wipe out the colony, but as long as the queen survives she just keeps pumping out eggs, boom, boom, boom.”

Einar thinks. “We breed a mating flight, then. New queens. Winged virgins. They contain the terminator gene. They fly, they mate, and the new colony that results becomes a dead one.”

“That'll limit the growth of new colonies,” Barry says. “It stops the spread of the Myrmidons. But it won't do anything for the ones that exist.”

“So, think,” Einar says. “Get your teeth around it. Use your
brains. How could we counter the existing colonies? What is our solution?”

“Poison,” Barry says.

“
No,
” Einar snaps. “That is not an acceptable answer. That's the answer we already have. Poison is the brute's choice. It works if you're some local
pest control technician
. You want to kill a single colony, maybe poison. We need bigger. We need innovation. You are geniuses. Act like it.”

“The yeast,” Kit says. “We engineer a new yeast. Yeasts are simple enough eukaryotes. It can be pathogenic for humans—especially immunocompromised people. But if we can feed the colonies a yeast that is pathogenic for
ants
. . .”

Barry sits forward. “That's it! Ants are fundamentally predictable little jerks, right? You drop food at a picnic and they swarm it—but they're not eating it. Not really. They're ingesting it, taking it into their stomach to carry it back to the colony, where they actually spit it back up out of their mouths or something through their, ahem,
back doors,
and they use it to feed the larvae, the males, or—” He points to Hannah expectantly.

“The . . . queen?” she tries.

“Bingo! Give the lady a stuffed panda. They feed
the queen
. First and foremost, the queen must get fed. So we take this new yeast, this pathogenic yeast, and we just spray that stuff everywhere. Long as it's harmless to people and the environment. The ants start nibbling on it, picking it up, taking it to her, and it kills her. And them. Slowly but surely. God, if you really want to go gonzo with it, you do a
Cordyceps
thing with it—turn it into a zombie maker. But I don't think we have that kind of time . . .”

Hannah says, “That means you wouldn't even need to produce new ants. No need to create a terminator version.”

“I disagree,” Einar says. “The terminator will be our first offensive. We cannot guarantee, given the sheer numbers of Myrmidons created by Will, that they will not have some way to adapt to the
yeast—a yeast we have not even created yet. The ants will be easier to replicate immediately
provided
we find Will—or, at least, take hold of his research.”

Kit nods. “It'll take a while to cook up the yeast. Simple is simple, but it's still something entirely new.”

Hannah notes that Kit looks much improved. The scientists are excited to have a solution. It's the perfect distraction. And Hannah notes how Einar engineered this moment—not as some crass team-building exercise, but shepherding his people to do something greater. It's clear to see why he's a leader. Not just a leader—a visionary.

The visionary speaks: “That is the plan, then. We reach Kauai. We seek Will swiftly. I know where he lives, so Hannah and I will go to find him—”

Hannah interrupts. “I don't think we should strike out on our own. We should find Hollis. We head to Barking Sands, to the base.”

“Once there, what?” Einar asks. “We wait for the ants to come? We wait for the dead to be counted? That base is overrun by not just the military—an organization driven into the ground by its bureaucracy—but dozens of competing companies who surely each have their own solution to this crisis and will be squabbling to decide who can be the hero. Meanwhile, our hands will be bound with all that red tape. We must seize actionable evidence while we can.”

“Let's not forget,” Ray says, “that if you show your face, they'll want to put you in a room for questioning.”

Hannah knows that Ray is right. And she agrees with him. She doesn't say it aloud, but she'll do anything to get Einar in that room.

“They will,” says Einar. “They will seek the source of this thing and will hold me responsible.” He hesitates. A small bit of emotion enters his voice, surprising Hannah. Is it real? Or just artifice? “And they should. I am responsible. This was my company. Will and Ajay were my hires. So, yes. I admit it. I want to be the one to solve this problem because that is how I pay this debt. Not by sitting in some
room, questioned by an imbecile too dumb for university but just smart enough for military service.”

Behind them, thunder rolls across the open sea. And ahead, the distant sliver of an island—their destination, it seems. Dread crawls across her skin on delicate legs as Hannah fears what they'll find when they arrive.