Minutes to Burn

Coos issuing from its body, the larva inched over to Derek. Absent-mindedly, he ran a hand over its abdomen segments. "Listen to that," Rex said. "And now to this." Placing his hands on the adult creature's back, he pressed down. A hissing filled the camp as air escaped the hockey puck-sized holes along the abdomen segments. "The sounds from both the larva and adult come from the spiracles. They must feed an internal respiratory organ, as we discussed."

"How the fuck?" Diego shook his head. "How the fucking fuck?"

Rex pulled seven water-sample jars from his backpack and set them on the ground in a line before Diego. They were each neatly labeled, with the time, date, and source location. Rex reached for an elbow light and turned it on, running the lens behind the row of jars so they each lit up in turn with a blood-red glow. The others glanced over, intrigued by his theatrical presentation. Sensing Rex was about to convey something useful, Cameron signaled them over. Derek sat on the nearest log, while Tank and Savage stood.

"What appears to be different about these samples?" Rex asked.

Diego studied them, puzzled, as Rex ran the light back across them. "Nothing."

"Exactly. However, the three on the end aren't taken from the ocean. One is your lagoon sample, I took one from a clear puddle in the road, and this is the one from the natural basin near the lava tube."

"I saw you," Diego said. "But that's impossible. They're all tinted red from dinoflagellates. But dinos are generally pelagic. How did they get from the ocean to the highlands?"

"Well," Rex said, pleased with himself, "dinos can go into a dormant, sporelike state, which allows them to survive extreme conditions, like dehydration and low temperatures. They're most highly concentrated in the waters off the southeastern point of the island-the water that gets shot through the blowholes. My guess is that the spores get blown around in the wind streams and settle all over the island through the garua mist. The little landlocked pools have a decent amount of salinity from the blowholes and the mists, which permits the spores to bloom again. This means the virus, contained in those dinoflagellate spores, could reach animals from the highlands to the coast. I think it found a susceptible species. Galapagia obstinatus."

Diego shook his head, his face drained of color. "How?" he asked.

Rex reached into his bag and pulled out the segment of the sun-damaged mantid ootheca that Frank had kept in his tent. It was pep-pered with parasite wasp holes. Holding it up, Rex closed one eye and peered through one of the holes, telescope-style. "UV damage kept the ootheca from hardening enough to prevent parasitic wasps from drilling through the shell. The virus probably invaded the ootheca later through the wasp holes, acting on the developing mantid nymphs that weren't eaten by wasp offspring, and altering their genetic composition before they hatched."

Diego picked up a jar, turning it in his hand. "How do you know these dinos are infected?"

Rex pursed his lips. "We don't. They look normal under a standard lens, but we can't definitively determine whether they're infected without running a gel, and we don't have the equipment here. But we do know that they were infected two months ago when Frank pulled the samples and had them shipped to us."

Diego handed him back the jar. "But we don't even know what the virus does to begin with. It could merely be a plant virus. You're com-pletely hypothesizing."

"A new virus appears on the same island we discover a massive living aberration… I just can't help thinking they've got to be linked, either through direct or shared causation."

Diego shook his head. "This animal could be an ordinary mutation."

Cameron looked at the jagged moons of the mantid's mandibles, flickering darkly in the firelight.

"I don't know about that," Rex said.

"Why not?" Diego looked up, his eyes alight. "Evolution doesn't progress slowly and evenly-it progresses in sudden and giant leaps. The Cambrian Explosion, the Permian and Cretaceous Extinctions-all blinks of the eye." He paused, pulling his hair back to band his ponytail more tightly. "Think of the reptiles dying out during the Mesozoic Period, the graptolite's rapid decline after the Ordovician Period, the sudden evolution of complex Metazoa. The fossil record has always shown punctuated equilibrium-mass extinction and abrupt origination." He pointed to the mantid corpse. "Speciation like this can take place in a geological instant."

Cameron looked over at Rex, unsure of what to make of Diego's sud-den tirade. Rex cleared his throat before speaking. "A geological instant is hundreds of thousands of years."

Diego looked down at his pants, stained with mud and torn at one knee. "Well, it just got shorter."

A piece of charred wood collapsed in the fire, startling them both. Diego crouched over the dead, slumped mantid. He reached out and stroked the waxy cuticle covering the abdomen. "Beautiful, isn't it?"