“Might as well. The gross morphology I’m seeing here is no different than a bacterium on Earth.” She used a pointer. “Here’s the cell wall.” She checked a readout as she used her pointer to delineate a section of the wall and clicked. “Got the same polysaccharides and peptides, which we expected from the original survey research. The theory is that organic chemistry—being the same all across the universe—will have the same structure and function on Donovan as it does on Earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen only fit together in so many ways. At the atomic level, chemistry has to follow the rules of covalence and bonding. Can only form so many shapes of molecules here or back home. The simplest organic molecules to do the job will be the most likely molecules that life will use.”
Vik dialed up the magnification, used her pointer to mark another small box inside the cellular wall, and clicked. Again, she studied the readout. “That’s the plasma membrane. Again, no surprises. Could be terrestrial chemistry with a few oddities. I’m seeing a bilayer composed of phospholipids and proteins.”
Vik outlined a box in the cytoplasm and clicked. “Okay, this is a little different. These structures here? Essentially they serve as the ribosomes. The architecture is almost the same with some variations in morphology compared to what we see on Earth. Fits the model. If you are making proteins with RNA, how many different ways can nature engineer that factory? In fact, mix ribosomal proteins and rRNAs together in vitro and they’ll reform into a functional ribosome. That’s just chemistry.”
Now Vik stared thoughtfully. “Here’s a big difference, Michaela. I should see what we call a nucleoid where the DNA is. I’m not getting one.” Vik increased the magnification, searching through the granular image, and stopped. As she enlarged the image, what looked like a traditional S-twist, tightly wrapped and knotty rope seemed to emerge in the cytoplasm.
“What’s that?”
“I think that’s our mysterious TriNA. Let me get a better perspective.” Vik blocked it, clicked, and stared at her screen. “The scope tags its chemical signature as deoxyribonucleic acid.” A pause. “But we know it isn’t. Structure’s wrong. It’s not a double helix. It’s a rope-shaped, three-strand molecule.” She smiled. “Wow! It’s like, real, you know?”
“Glad you’re so thrilled.”
“Hey, Michaela, I’m looking at three-strand DNA that I just resolved on my own scope. This is life on another planet. Proof. What I came here to see. And this is just the first step.”
“Okay, so jazz over it later. Record it so we know what we’re looking for.”
“Just like the reports from PA, it’s a lot stiffer, bent around more like a wad of wire than the way DNA’s double helix can be compacted into chromatids. Wow. This is going to be a whole new world of polymerases, histones, helicases, and binding proteins. Let me get some more images.”
Michaela waited while Vik changed the angle and clicked, all the while building a three-dimensional model on the screen. When she was finished, she cycled the slide and slipped in one that she had precipitated from Toni’s blood sample.
Vik wiggled her fingers, as if tuning them like a maestro at the keyboard. “All right, if Dr. Turnienko suspects TriNA, our first task is to see if it’s what we call cell-free. That means it would be circulating in Toni’s bloodstream. Or, at least, that’s what we’re going to test for to start with. Recovering cfDNA is a relatively easy procedure using centrifugation. I’ve processed Toni’s blood, and it should be ready.”
She slipped from the chair, stepped to the centrifuge, and recovered a tube. Placing it in one of her machines, she monitored a screen as the supernatant was removed. Then the sample was automatically transferred to the slide, stained, and presented behind a transparent door.
Vik carefully removed the slide, carried it over, and placed it in her scope.
“Truth time,” she murmured. “Let’s see if anything is running around in Toni’s blood.”
Michaela watched the microscope adjust magnification, its programming searching the slide for anything that might have resembled the TriNA molecule they’d recorded in the prokaryote cell.
The haze on the screen refined, the image firming up.
Michaela, of course, recognized the intertwined spaghetti of DNA, which was what the centrifugation protocol and methodology was designed to recover. And there, right in the middle of the tangle of DNA, like a bent-up and coiled wire, was the now-familiar form.
“What the hell?” Michaela wondered. “TriNA. But, where did he get it?”
“And more to the point,” Vik noted as she began to scan the slide, picking up the twisted-wire form again and again, “Where did Toni get so much of it?”
“Go back a couple of steps,” Michaela suggested. “Do you still have the pellet you recovered from Toni’s blood after centrifugation?”
“Of course.”
“Check it. See if you can recover anything larger. Maybe a cell.”
“Got it.”
Vik stepped over to her centrifuge, gave it a command for a sample reference. Again, the drawer popped open, a slide prepared. This she brought back to the microscope and inserted.
The scope searched the slide, changing magnifications, and the first thing that popped was the familiar image of red blood cells, the occasional, much larger white blood cells, and there, in the plasma, something that appeared as a blanket-like honeycomb of cells.
“What’s that?” Michaela pointed.
Vik boxed it, clicked, and the image expanded to fill the screen. “I’ll be damned. But wait. Let me get a three-dimensional look with X-ray and resonance.” The woman’s competent fingers clicked several of the keys, and the image seemed to pop from the screen, to fix on one of the hexagonally shaped cells, its internal structure in eerie relief.
“So, it has a different morphology from that first reference prokaryote we recovered from seawater.” Michaela pointed. “What are these structures?”
Vik again boxed and clicked, looked at the internally folded organelles, and clicked on the FTIR function. “I’d call them the Donovanian equivalent of a terrestrial chloroplast. Whatever this is, it’s capable of photosynthesis.”
“Some sort of plant cells? In the kid’s blood?”
Vik’s jaw had tensed. “Not a plant, Michaela. I’m not reading cellulose. The structural support is some kind of polymer. This is nothing from Earth. Besides, terrestrial plant cells have a nucleus. This thing is a combination of weird organelles the likes of which I’ve never seen.”
Vik boxed a section of cytoplasm, clicked, and enlarged. “Got you, you toilet-sucker.” She glanced sidelong at Michaela. “Recognize that?”
“Yep. TriNA.” A cold shiver ran through her. “Toni’s got some kind of colony living inside of him that’s made up of photosynthesizing cells. And his blood is full of cell-free TriNA.”
“So, what do we do now, Director?”
“Vik, I don’t have a fricking clue. I can’t even imagine what kind of etiology we’re talking about. But however Toni was exposed, it’s all through the kid’s body.”
“Doesn’t make sense!” Vik cried. “That little boy has never been outside the Pod. This is a photosynthesizing cellular organism. How is it living inside the child’s body? There is no way it could have infected him. The kid’s three!”
“No clue,” Michaela told her. “But one thing we’d better figure out bottom-line up-front: Is this stuff contagious?”
Vik didn’t answer; she just stared at the screen.
Thinking of her daughter, Sheena, no doubt.
42
Felix hated being scared. And now he was really, really scared. One by one he and the rest of the children had been marched up the now-threatening stairs to the second level. A forbidden place of mystery and wonder with its labs and specimen rooms, everything up there reeked of danger and threat. Like it had been back on Ashanti
where cannibals were down on Deck Three. Living there. Just under that thin layer of sialon beneath his feet. Everyone was afraid that they might get past the sealed hatch, creep up the stairs at night, and kidnap people to be hauled back down into that dark and terrible place to be horribly killed, cut up into bloody pieces, and eaten.
The Pod had been free of monsters. The first safe place Felix had ever known. There were no cannibals, no terrifying monsters that would drag a kid away from his parents and, in this case, up dark stairs to some awful fate.
That had all changed. Some creepy alien thing had sneaked into Toni’s body and made him sick. Word was Toni couldn’t move. That he was still trapped inside, alive, but that creatures were running around in his blood. Doing evil things.
What would that feel like? To have aliens crawling around inside his veins and swimming in his blood? The whole idea made Felix’s skin crawl. Made him want to go stand in the shower where anything that might get on him would be washed away before it could eat a hole into his skin and crawl inside him.
But the worst part was that Toni had been put inside something called an isolation tent. He was now living inside a big plastic bag. The air he breathed was cycled in from outside, and then sent out through a vent pipe that heated it really hot before blowing it outside again. So hot that nothing could live.
Felix now sat in his room, his skin itching. It had been itching for days, but nothing like this. Had to be because he was afraid of itty-bitty aliens creeping around, looking for a place that they could crawl inside him.
He shook himself all over, pulled off his shirt, was looking for any sign of crawly . . .
The door opened, Mother stepping in. She had that look on her face. The one she got when things were really bad.
“Why is your shirt off?”
“Nothing. I was just looking at it.” He tried to frown studiously at the fabric.
“How do you feel, Felix?”
“I’m fine,” he lied. He didn’t dare tell Mother his skin itched, or that it felt slightly greasy. Just like his fingers always felt ever since he and Mother had taken the boat ride out to drop the buoy. The itch and greasy feeling had been getting a lot worse ever since Toni had spilled the algae all over.
Then Mother was bent down, her gray-blue eyes serious. “Baby, you have to promise me. If you start feeling sick, you let me know. Let me know right away, okay, sweetie?”
Felix nodded. He hated it when she called him baby. He was eight, after all. “I will.”
Did he tell her about the way his body jerked all by itself? Or how, on occasion, his vision would get funny, runny, and full of colors? And there was something going on that he couldn’t quite understand. Sometimes he’d think about reaching for something. Just think about it. And his arm would do it. All by itself. Even if he kept willing his arm to stay put.
Mother was staring hard at him now. “I know that look. Is something wrong? Are you feeling sick? Hiding it from me?”
“No, Mama.” He felt better and gave her a relieved smile. Things like feeling oily and his arms doing stuff he didn’t ask them to, that was different. He’d been sick before and thrown up, and his guts had hurt. What he was going through was really different from being sick.
Mother clamped a hand to his forehead, feeling for fever. Then, relieved, she straightened. “I’ve got to go. We’re taking the subs out today, and with Shin gone, I have to monitor the control board. I want you to go to the cafeteria. The other children will be there. Bill can keep an eye on you, and Iso will be in and out checking.”
“What about Toni?”
“Sweetie, Toni’s really sick. We can’t figure out where he could have come in contact with TriNA. We’ve been so careful about the sample collection. And Toni has never been out of the Pod. He couldn’t have touched the subs or the UUVs. We’re doing everything we can to trace the etiology of the contamination.”
Felix wondered what etiology of contamination meant.
She gave him a relieved smile. “Okay, I’m off for the tube. You trot yourself down to the cafeteria, and you don’t leave until either Father or I come to get you. Got that?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Then, off you go.” She pointed at the door.
Felix led the way. After she turned off and worked the pressure hatch for the tube that would take her down to the Underwater Bay, Felix stopped at the cafeteria door. Willed himself to stand still. Then he lifted his right arm, extended his hand to the door latch. Didn’t touch it.
Lowering his arm, he willed himself to keep his arm still. Focusing on the latch—but ordering his arm to stay put—he nevertheless watched it rise, felt the touch of the latch as his arm opened the door.
How weird was that?
43
Dressed in a chamois-hide shirt, claw-shrub-fiber pants belted at the waist, and her quetzal-hide boots, Kalico straight-armed the door to the conference room in the big dome. She wasn’t sure how this was going to go. Her crew chiefs, engineers, and head techs were all seated around the table, some standing in the rear.
She had thought to hold this in the cafeteria, with all of her one hundred and thirteen people. But not after that debacle back in the Pod. Not that her people were anything like the Maritime Unit, but fact was, Kalico felt gun-shy after the lambasting she’d taken. Far better that she limit this to her administrative staff. She’d still get a feel for the mood her people were in.
“Where are we? Any news?” she demanded as she took the sole open seat at the head of the table.
Desch shook his head, eyes lowered. “No news, Supervisor. Jin and Masters volunteered to stay at the portal. Last I talked to them, maybe fifteen minutes ago, they said that but for a couple of rumbles, the tunnel’s quiet. They’ve wired geophones into the rock. Clever of them, actually. But even with the extra sensitivity, there’s nothing resembling a human sound. No tapping, nothing rhythmic. Most of what they’re hearing sounds like fill settling. If they’re interpreting the sounds right, the void migration has slowed. The fill has probably about used up the volume.”
Kalico looked around, going from face to face. “Where’re Bogarten and Talovich? They should be here.”
Ghosh leaned forward at the table, rubbing his tired face with dirty hands. “They’re down at the river with a couple of aquajade beams that had been laying around. Talovich has taken this hard, Supervisor. He thinks it’s somehow his fault. That he didn’t figure the load-bearing design right. He’s trying—”
“Excuse me? You’re telling me that my structural engineer and my top chemist and fabricator are down at the river? Alone? That while we’re sitting here, some quetzal or flock of mobbers might be chowing down on two of my most important people? I gave them an order! They trying to get themselves eaten? Or shot?”
Ghosh gave her a bleary-eyed stare, a trace of a smile on his lips. “Talovich said you’d say that. Neither, ma’am. They took two of the marines, Abu Sassi and Dina Michegan, in armor and with tech, to watch their backs. That should keep them from being eaten. And Talovich said if he couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, he deserved to be shot.”
Kalico narrowed an eye, felt the building rage shift into a macabre sense of amusement. Piss in a pot, she’d been on Donovan for too long. That, and her people knew her too well.
“All right. They get a break this time. Unless this goes sideways, and we lose somebody else.” She considered as they watched her, their expressions running the gamut from worry to outright grief. “No one ever said that any of this would be easy. And I think we were getting too cocky. Think about it. We’ve won every battle. Built the smelter, beat back the forest, exterminated the local mobbers, learned how to mine the Number One and Number Two, made ourselves richer than half the Boardmembers in Transluna. We’re growing our own food. We’ve figured out how to build whatever we need, almost from scratch. We’ve got eleven familie
s with kids.”
“The Number Three shouldn’t have collapsed,” Desch insisted doggedly. “We weren’t cocky, Supervisor. Sure, it was a risky business, shooting our way through that shocked-rock zone. But Ghosh, Bogarten, me, Talovich . . . all of us . . . we figured out how to do it. We all double-checked the math, tested the shoring. The geometry was right. The shoring should have taken the load. That’s just physics and solid engineering. We’ve been beating our heads against the wall ’cause what happened shouldn’t have.”
Ghosh added, “And we need the Number Three, ma’am. As deep as we are in the mountain with the Number One and Two, we can’t pump out the water make. Our pumps, running round the clock, can barely keep up. Any deeper and we either need more or bigger pumps.”
Kalico leaned back, ran a finger along the scar on her cheek. “Hell of a thing, to be stopped by water after all we’ve been through. Can we make a bigger pump?”
Ghosh nodded. “Bogarten, Stryski, and I can draw up the plans. We’ll need Lawson and Montoya to help fabricate, along with Mac Hanson to cast the housing up at PA. That’s just for the pump. Problem comes with the hose. We’ll need to fabricate that. The larger the diameter, the stronger it has to be to keep it from collapsing under vacuum. And then there’s the power. We’re going to have to figure how much the water weighs, friction in the line, what the load is, and how much horsepower we’re going to need. That means we’re going to have to see if we can generate that kind of electrical power.”
Ituri tapped an index finger on the table as he asked, “Or do we want to use hydrocarbons? See if we can broker something with Ollie Throlson for a supply of diesel? Might be easier to run it on internal combustion than build the electric motor and generate the power.”
“We’ve got a slew of electric motors in old equipment that’s just laying around outside PA’s landing field.” Stryski reminded them as he joined the conversation. “Most of the motors are essentially new. The equipment was abandoned in the first place because of a lack of spare parts that had nothing to do with the engines.”
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