He wanted to scream with exhilaration. It had been a short but wild ride. He clambered over the side of the helicopter with a little help from a crewman as he was winched on board.

He looked down. The helicopter was hovering well clear of the fog. Being careful. Just as well, he thought. If you knew what was roaming around in there, though, you'd be a lot higher still.

Ten or twenty minutes later, they were leaving the fog-covered township of Orewa behind them, soaring high above the mist on the black blades of the chopper.

Crowe was leaning forward, busy on the radio, asking questions, and answering them as well. Their faceplates were open and the fresh air tasted great.

Crowe sat back after a few moments and his eyes were grim. Tane had heard why. Four of his men had disappeared when the mist had rolled in from the north.

"What about Xena?" he asked Fatboy.

"We'll go back for her later," he said carefully. "When the fog has cleared."

Tane wasn't sure if that was likely to happen or not, but he let it go. He didn't want to upset Rebecca any further.

She had been silent since they had been s.n.a.t.c.hed off the rooftop, thinking, wordlessly working away inside her own mind. She looked up now, though, and said suddenly, "I know what they are."

All eyes were on her.

"I bought into the idea of bacterial cl.u.s.ters"-she was looking directly at Crowe-"of giant pathogens, because we didn't have any other ideas. But that didn't explain, that couldn't explain, the snowmen."

She paused, thinking, and Crowe took the opportunity to interject, "It's the best guess we've got. Until some more reasonable explanation is found. And I mean reasonable, not some fantastical story about-"

Rebecca was staring at him now, frowning, a look of realization slowly dawning on her face.

"You know, don't you? You don't want to admit it, but you know too."

Crowe interrupted, "I don't know what you're-"

"The moment that Tane said 'shape recognition.' That's when you realized. You couldn't not not have known. You're an immunologist. Heck, I'm just a fourteen-year-old kid, so it took me a little longer to work it out, but you must have known straightaway." have known. You're an immunologist. Heck, I'm just a fourteen-year-old kid, so it took me a little longer to work it out, but you must have known straightaway."

Southwell seemed shocked. "Rebecca, are you saying what I think you're saying? My G.o.d, you'd better be wrong."

"They are bacterial cl.u.s.ters," Crowe insisted.

"They're not! And you know they're not." Rebecca was thinking furiously now. "The strange Y-shaped jellyfish. Those...things...in the fog. It's so obvious. You do know. I know you know."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Tane shouted. "What are they? What are the jellyfish if they're not bacterial cl.u.s.ters?"

Rebecca spoke distinctly, as the rotor blades of the helicopter changed pitch in preparation for landing.

"Antibodies," she said.

IMMUNITY Manderson lowered his eyes and smiled quietly to himself. Crowe just sighed tiredly. Only Lucy Southwell looked kindly at Rebecca and said, "You know that's impossible, don't you?" smiled quietly to himself. Crowe just sighed tiredly. Only Lucy Southwell looked kindly at Rebecca and said, "You know that's impossible, don't you?"

Manderson looked up with a bemused expression and said, "I suppose that would make the big ones, the snowmen, phagocytes of some kind."

"Macrophages," Rebecca said firmly. "Mother Nature's immune system. Now triggered by Dr. Vicky Green. Against the human race."

Southwell put a hand on her arm. "Rebecca, it's an imaginative idea but just not very likely. Antibodies are simple proteins. They're microscopic."

"I never said they were human antibodies," Rebecca said, and wouldn't say anything else until the helicopter had landed on the lined green surface of the main playing field at the North Harbor Sports Stadium in Albany.

The Command and Control Center was set up in a sponsors' lounge on the fourth floor of the stadium. Through huge plate-gla.s.s windows, the green rectangle of the rugby ground was now home to a number of helicopters and row upon row of armored fighting vehicles, preparing for battle.

Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy were waiting to leave. Their transportation was coming up from the central city. All vehicles here apparently were already hard at work, transporting troops and equipment to build the defensive line.

"They are antibodies," Rebecca finally spoke again, in a small but determined voice. "Antibodies and macrophages. Accept it. You have to. You can't defeat what you can't understand."

Crowe glanced momentarily up from a detailed topographical map of the surrounding area that he and a gray-haired officer from the SAS had been poring over for about fifteen minutes, discussing something called kill zones, along with fields of fire and "claymores."

Crowe said without any further trace of humor, "Rebecca, even if that were possible, think about what you're saying. That would make us-human beings-pathogens. Antibodies attack pathogens."

"I know," Rebecca said softly.

Crowe shook his head and turned back to his work. An SAS trooper entered, saluted, and pa.s.sed a note to the SAS officer.

Rebecca said, "We think of the Earth as a lump of rock, floating through s.p.a.ce. Just a big stone, conveniently placed in a nice warm spot for us to grow on, like mold on cheese. But that's just a way of thinking about it. What if we thought of this planet in a different way. As a complex web of interrelated ecosystems, host to billions upon billions of smaller organisms." She paused. "Not all that unlike the human body when you think about it."

Crowe ignored her, sketching in a line of defendable positions on the map.

Manderson just sat quietly in the corner. Of all of them, only he seemed unfazed by what they had just been through.

A young soldier in the uniform of the regular New Zealand army came in with a stack of orders, which Crowe checked and the other man signed.

Through the window, Tane saw the first line of fighting vehicles began to move out.

Rebecca stood up and crossed to the map table. She leaned over it, her hands on the table, interrupting their work.

"You know what global warming is?" Rebecca asked calmly. "I do. The world has a fever. We are pathogens. Mother Nature is sick and the sickness is us!"

Crowe looked up at her through half-closed lids. Almost a display of emotion, Tane thought.

"I lost four men today," he said slowly. "I am not in the mood, and I don't have the time for your childish environmental fantasies. Get her out of here."

This last was to Manderson, who rose without question and moved behind Rebecca.

Rebecca didn't budge. She laughed, a little hysterically, which was unusual for her, but then again, it had been a very unusual day, Tane thought.

She said, "We don't inhabit a place: We infest it. We poison rivers; we pollute the skies and chop down the trees. We drill holes deep into the earth and suck out all the goodness. We are malignant and highly infectious."

Manderson grasped Rebecca by the arms, but Lucy Southwell intervened, drawing Rebecca away from the table. "What are you saying, Rebecca? That Professor Green somehow created an antidote to the human race?"

"No. I think these things have been there all along. Locked in our genes. Some kind of safety cutout. A self-destruct mechanism for the human species. I don't think Vicky Green invented them. I don't think she even discovered them. But by playing around with the building blocks of life, I think she finally triggered them against us."

Southwell said, "That's crazy, Rebecca. Listen to what you're saying. You're wrong."

She led Rebecca across to the large window and stared out at the bush-covered ridge in the distance and the blue skies above that.

Tane and Fatboy followed. After a while, Fatboy asked, "But what if she is right?"

"She's not," Southwell said. "I've studied this field my whole life. It's just not possible."

Somehow she sounded less sure than she had a moment ago.

Fatboy repeated his question. "But if she is right?"

Southwell sighed. "An antibody exists for only one purpose-to destroy an infection. An antibody has no conscience, no morals, no power to decide. It just does what it was created for. It binds to an infectious particle and disables it, to make it easier for a macrophage to absorb it and destroy it. That's all it does. If what you are saying is true, then that's it. That's the end of the human species."

"I know," Rebecca said. "And maybe it's all we deserve."

"For Christ's sake, get that child out of here!" Crowe shouted, shaking his head erratically from side to side. Even the stoic Manderson seemed shocked at the uncharacteristic display of emotion from his commanding officer.

He motioned to Tane and Fatboy, who didn't argue but pushed open the double doors to the lounge and began to walk along the short corridor to the wide concrete staircase. Fatboy took the Chronophone. Manderson followed to make sure they did as they were told, and Southwell helped Rebecca along behind them.

Rebecca was crying now, and Tane wanted to comfort her but wasn't sure that she'd want him to; besides, Lucy seemed to be doing that job.

They exited the building and moved slowly past one of the huge black trucks and trailers of the USABRF team. The snout of the truck was tucked into the lee of the building.

An army Land Rover pulled to a halt by a row of ticket gates, and a uniformed soldier got out expectantly. A young-looking blond girl in the uniform of the transport corps.

"Why won't he listen?" Rebecca asked between sobs. "What's wrong with him?"

Manderson spoke up then, and in the Texan's slow Southern drawl, Tane heard a whisper that maybe he wasn't quite so convinced that Rebecca was wrong.

"What d'ya think is wrong with him? The skipper has spent his entire life fighting against dangerous germs and nasty bugs." Manderson turned and spat some gum into a plastic rubbish bin by the back wheels of the big black truck.

"An' you just told him he is one!"

BEFORE THE S STORM Private Gemma Shaw drove quickly, expertly, without speaking, at a regulation sixty miles per hour, heading west on the Northwestern Motorway. expertly, without speaking, at a regulation sixty miles per hour, heading west on the Northwestern Motorway.

Tane wondered how fast she'd drive if one of them them was behind her. was behind her.

Convoys of trucks pa.s.sed them on the other side of the motorway, great olive-green behemoths with huge jagged tires, long columns of them that stretched into the distance. But in their direction, the motorway was clear, at least until they got out of the Albany basin.

Private Shaw carefully braked and brought the army Land Rover to a halt.

Tane stared at the scene in front of him. Two hundred thousand people lived on the North Sh.o.r.e of Auckland City, and it seemed that all of them were jammed into little metal boxes down the four lanes ahead. There seemed to be no order to it. No careful lines of cars. It was just a jumble of multicolored pieces, as if someone had emptied a LEGO set down the motorway. The cars spilled from lane to lane, invading the shoulder and even the narrow gra.s.s of the median strip, rasping paint off their doors as they sc.r.a.ped along the median barriers. There were five and in some places even six cars squeezed into the narrow asphalt corridor.

There were family wagons, and sedans, and tradesmen's vans, stuffed to the gunnels with belongings and people. Every second vehicle seemed to be a big, square four-wheel drive, spewing black and brown diesel fumes from its exhaust. Motorcycles somehow found c.h.i.n.ks in the solid metal armor of the roadway, weaving and winding their way through.

Just past Bush Road a late model Audi had been abandoned in the middle of the center lane. There was no way to get it off the road; instead, it was bulldozed along by the Toyota SUV behind. Whenever the Audi veered to the left or the right, a clip from a car in one of the side lanes steered it back into line. Already it was a wreck from the constant battering. And yet, with the relentless pressure of the traffic, it kept moving, as if it too wanted to escape the horror that was creeping across farmlands, through gullies, and down the highway, a few miles to the north.

Members of a North Sh.o.r.e evangelical church walked the length of the motorway, clambering over car bonnets when they had to, handing out muesli bars and bottled water and religious tracts. Voices were shouting and horns were blaring, and from at least one vehicle, now pushed to the side, a column of smoke rose out of the engine.

"How the h.e.l.l are we going to get through that?" Fatboy asked in dismay.

"Won't be a problem, sir," Private Shaw said, and performed an extremely nonregulation U-turn in the middle of the motorway, driving the wrong way down the on-ramp, under the overpa.s.s, and back up the off-ramp on the other side of the motorway. There was a police roadblock on the off-ramp to prevent people from doing exactly what Shaw was doing. They needed the eastbound lanes clear for the convoys of trucks. The army vehicle and Shaw's ID got them through the roadblock without problem, though.

Shaw turned her headlights on full-beam, even though it was daylight, as a warning to the oncoming traffic.

They pa.s.sed police cars at irregular intervals down the motorway, trying ineffectually to create some order out of the chaos.

They saw any number of minor nose-to-tail accidents, but the drivers did not even bother to stop. One car was sc.r.a.ping its front b.u.mper along the roadway in front of it.

Not that they were moving far. A yard at a time if they were lucky.

Most of the cars were packed with belongings. Suitcases strapped onto roof racks, backseats stuffed with cardboard boxes and canvas bags. They pa.s.sed one car with an elderly woman sitting in a kayak strapped onto a roof rack, wearing a bicycle helmet for protection. The car was driven by a middle-aged couple. There was no room in the backseat for the old lady because that was taken up by three ferocious-looking rottweilers.

"What are we going to do?" Tane asked. "When we get home?"

"Tell Mum and Dad what's going on," Fatboy said. "Then get over to Rebecca's house."

Rebecca's mum had been questioned and released, and was now back at the West Harbor house, according to Crowe.

They had tried phoning them from the stadium but got only a recorded voice telling them to try again later. The entire telephone system was overloaded across Auckland as a panicking population tried to contact friends or relatives.

Rebecca had stopped crying now, but there was a strange sadness about her. More than that, a sense that she didn't care anymore. That nothing mattered. It was like a wall around her, and even Fatboy didn't try to penetrate it.

Tane wondered if she was right. About the antibodies and macrophages. He had known her for the whole of his life, of her life, too, and she was seldom wrong about anything.

Yet Crowe had been so insistent.