Pandemic Page 23

He would play his role. He’d make sure she ate, make sure she slept, because she forgot to do both when she lost herself in research. He’d fetch her coffee. He’d clean her clothes. Whatever it took; when the real s.h.i.+t hit the fan, Margaret Montoya took center stage, and Clarence was fine with that.

Captain Yasaka entered. Clarence stood up instantly, faster than he would have liked — leftover reactions from his days in the service. At least he didn’t salute.

Margaret stayed seated.

Captain Yasaka — actual rank of commander, but operating under the honorary t.i.tle of captain like the commander of every s.h.i.+p in the navy — was as neat and clean as her stateroom. Her graying black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her dark-blue coveralls looked like they had been pressed and then hung on a mannequin protected behind a plategla.s.s window. Her belt buckle was the only thing that outs.h.i.+ned her shoes. She stood all of five-six, but Clarence could tell that she had the presence needed to make tall boys quake in their boots if they failed in their duties.

All her meticulous grooming, however, didn’t hide her exhaustion, a certain slackness to her face. Yasaka looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t.

“Doctor Montoya,” she said. She shook hands with Margaret, then Clarence. “Agent Otto.”

Clarence nodded. “Captain.”

Yasaka gestured to Clarence’s chair: sit, relax.

Clarence sat, as did the captain.

“My apologies for making you wait,” she said. “We’re on full alert, and there were things that required my attention.”

Clarence waited for Margaret to speak. It was her show, after all; he was just the wingman. When she said nothing, he spoke for them both.

“Yes, ma’am,” Clarence said. “We understand.”

“I need to make this short,” the captain said. “I have a s.h.i.+p full of wounded, and I have to report about this meeting to Captain Tubberville over on the Pinckney. He’s the task force commander. So I can answer your questions, but please, let’s get to it.”

Margaret nodded. “I need to know what happened,” she said. “The timeline. Timelines are very important.”

Yasaka’s jaw muscles twitched. “Six days ago, at twenty-one-fourteen hours, an ROV from the Los Angeles located an object of interest. The s.h.i.+p commander dispatched a diver to recover that object. The diver wore an ADS 2000, the atmospheric diving suit required for such depths. He disembarked from a dry deck shelter modified for decontamination. The diver recovered the object, then returned to the DDS. While still wearing the ADS, he was sprayed in bleach to kill any possible external contaminant before reentering the s.h.i.+p proper.”

Margaret leaned forward. “The ROV spotted something special? Sending out a diver was unusual?”

“Not at all,” Yasaka said. “In fact, this was the six hundred and fifty-second time a diver from the Los Angeles had performed that task. Every two or three days, on average, the ROV saw something the onboard crew couldn’t identify. Whenever that happened, Captain Banks sent out a diver.”

Clarence wondered if the repet.i.tive, uneventful nature of their job had made the divers sloppy.

Yasaka continued. “At twenty-one-fifty-five hours that same day, the Los Angeles notified us that the object was a significant discovery.”

Margaret looked at Clarence, then at the captain. “So if they thought it was significant, why wasn’t it brought up to the Brashear? I was told this s.h.i.+p has a full BSL-4 research lab.”

Biosafety Level Four … Clarence hated those words. The most stringent safety procedures known to man, used for work with lethal, highly contagious airborne diseases like Marburg and Ebola, s.h.i.+t that could kill millions. BSL-4 suits — the kind Margaret wore to study the alien infection — had positive pressure: if something poked a hole in the suit, air pushed out instead of in, because contact with even a single, microscopic pathogen could mean death.

“My s.h.i.+p’s facilities are fully compliant,” Yasaka said. “We’ve brought up fifteen objects over the last five years. Sc.r.a.ps of Orbital hull, mostly. Bringing potentially contaminated items up from nine hundred feet below is dangerous, Doctor Montoya, and expensive, so the Los Angeles was retrofitted with a small lab of its own. Standard procedure was to make sure an object was not of terrestrial origin before sending it up.”

Margaret looked angry, annoyed. “So they found an alien object and they just held on to it for a few days?”

Yasaka nodded. “If they had found an alien body, or something that was clearly made by little green men, that would have been different. What they found looked like a strange can, so they prepped it and waited until they had enough data to merit the extensive procedures required to send something to the surface.”

Margaret wasn’t the only one getting annoyed; Clarence could see that Yasaka didn’t appreciate Margaret’s intensity. The captain had a s.h.i.+p full of wounded. Her crew had probably recovered hundreds of dead bodies from the Forrest Sherman and the Stratton. This wasn’t the time for Margaret to grill Yasaka about procedure. Clarence’s job of helping Margaret included stepping in when she was about to burn a bridge.

“So it was business as usual,” he said. “You would have probably ordered the object to be brought up, but you didn’t get the chance. What happened next?”

Margaret leaned back in her chair, tried to relax. She’d picked up on Clarence’s cue, knew she needed to back off a little.