Connected Infection

37. Gobi - Chapter 23.1

23

15:54 (UTC+8)

Raven shielded his eyes as Mendoza approached. He could tell from the coronel's expression that the search teams still hadn't found anything.

'We're overlooking something,' he said, turning to Popescu. She stood beside him on the rock, scanning the area where the two fleeing Hos had died, their bodies flung high into the air and riddled with massive radiation burns.

'I know. I can't figure it out,' she said, passing him a canteen of water. She nodded to the left. 'But we have more prisoners.'

Raven followed her gaze. Immediately after she had fired the antimatter weapon the infected GASP employees and Mongolian civilians in the desert had stopped fighting. Many succumbed immediately to heat exhaustion or injuries they had previously been able to ignore, and for a few minutes the others had acted confused and disorientated. Not a few had died before the guns of the Mongolian People's Army. Now Major General Medekhgui had ordered his men to round up the survivors and hold them under armed guard, and it was another captive group that they watched marched past.

Mendoza stopped at the base of the rock and looked up at the agents. 'Nothing so far,' he reported, wiping sweat from his forehead. 'We have soldiers doing multiple passes, but if there is anything to be found it cannot be big.'

'Maybe whatever it is has been buried under some of the ejecta,' Raven suggested.

Popescu shook her head. 'Let's run through this again. These are the facts: The Mopho-hos flew someone or something from Casas Ibáñez. They crashed in the desert. Two others entered the wreckage, and then fled directly towards GASP with whatever they retrieved. I fired an antimatter weapon at them, which detonated approximately twenty-five meters distant, blasting them through the air and frying them with gamma rays. All the Hos immediately revert back to normal, but the radio jamming is still present. What's going on?'

'Are you sure they were holding something?' Raven asked her. 'I didn't see it.'

Popescu nodded. 'One of them had something in his hands as they started to run, but he held it before him so I couldn't get a good look at it. It was about the size of a grapefruit.'

'So where is it now?'

'Could the explosion have destroyed it?' Mendoza asked.

Raven glanced down at him. 'I don't know. Unlikely.'

'What about the radiation? Could that have evaporated it?'

Raven shrugged. He sat down on the baking surface of the rock and let his legs hang off the side. 'Let's try and look at this logically. We'll assume the explosion somehow freed all the Hos' minds. Therefore something in the vicinity of it - of which there only appear to be the two corpses, although we suspect the existence of some other object – must have been the cause of the Mopho's activity, or at least a relay of their controlling force.'

'Hidden tech? Fried by the EMP?' Popescu said, squatting down beside him.

'I thought of that,' he said. 'But where are the electronics? Under us? In the creatures themselves? They're too sophisticated, and that makes me think it unlikely that their other technology will be any more susceptible to EMPs.'

'Then, assuming this isn't some kind of bluff, the cause must be either blast or radiation damage - both of which the Hos themselves were subject to. Maybe we shouldn't be concentrating so much on this missing object. Maybe these two Hos are different.'

'They went in the suborbital wreckage,' Raven said. 'Maybe the object you saw contained something. We lost sight of them when that first tank blew up – maybe they used or assimilated whatever was inside, and then threw it away.'