The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert Page B

the passage outside their hatch. It was filled with a mass of clone flesh: furred bodies, strange limbs, oddly shaped heads. At the hatch two of the strongest clones were trying to maneuver a plasteel cutter, but their actions were impeded by the press of others behind them.
    “That’ll get them in here for sure,” someone said. “We’re cooked.”
    Illuyank turned and barked orders, pointing, waving a hand until all fifteen were busy in the Facilities Room—a valve to control, a switch to throw; each had some particular responsibility.
    Lewis keyed for sound in the screen and a confused babble came over the speakers.
    Illuyank signaled to a man at the remote valve controls across the room. “Dump the brine tanks into level two! That’ll flood the outer passage.”
    The man worked his controls, muttering as he followed the schematics at his position.
    Illuyank touched Lewis on the elbow, pointed to the screen which showed the courtyard. The clones there were looking away from the sensor, all of them at full alert, their attention on a broken segment of wall which led to the perimeter. Abruptly, almost as one organism, they dropped their rocks and glass weapons and ran screaming off-screen.
    “Runners,” Illuyank muttered.
    Lewis saw them then, a waving swarm of tiny pale worm shapes cresting the rubble. He could almost smell the burned acid and tasted acid in his throat. Automatically, he gave the orders.
    “Seal off.”
    “We can’t,” a timid voice from the edge of the room began. “Some of our people are still out there. If we seal off . . . if we . . . they’ll all . . .”
    “They’ll all die,” Lewis finished for him. “And our perimeter’s full of holes. Runners are in the courtyard. If we don’t seal off, we die, too. Seal off!”
    He crossed to a valve-control panel, punched the proper sequence. Lights above the panel showed that the indicated valve was closing. He could hear others around him obeying. Illuyank’s voice intruded with a quiet warning: “Check the surface shafts.” This brought another bustle of activity.
    Lewis glanced at the courtyard screen. A clone stumbled back into the sensor’s range, screaming and beating at his eyes with the blunt knobs which passed for his hands. As he moved into range, he fell and lay twisting on the ground. A blur of writhing shadows swept over him. The courtyard filled with fleeing clones and tiny, eel-like bodies. Behind Lewis, one of their group could be heard vomiting.
    “They’re in the passage,” Illuyank said. He gestured at the sensor where the view outside their hatch showed brine rising in the passage with a swarming mass of Nerve Runners riding in on the wave.
    Lewis shot a frantic glance at the hatch. What the sensor revealed was happening right out there!
    The brine stopped short of the passage ceiling, but not before it had shorted out the plasteel cutter.
    Clones were thrashing in the water, Nerve Runners covering them, but here and there dead Runners could be seen on the brine’s surface. And where the plasteel cutter had shorted out, a milky gray gas clouded the thin space over the water. Wherever the gas touched, Runners died.
    Lewis felt his mind leaping from item to item. Item: brine. Item: electrical short.
    “Chlorine,” he whispered. Then louder: “Chlorine!”
    “What ?” Illuyank was clearly puzzled.
    Lewis pointed at the screen. “Chlorine kills Nerve Runners!”
    “What’s chlorine?”
    “A gas created when you throw an electrical charge through sodium chloride brine.”
    “But . . .”
    “Chlorine kills Runners!” Lewis looked across the Facilities Room where the plaz-glass barrier showed a corner of clone area and the ocean beyond. “Are the sea pumps still working?”
    The man at the pump console checked his keyboard, then: “Most of them.”
    “Sea water wherever we can put it,” Lewis said. “We need a large container where we can dump it from here and throw an electrical charge through