* * *
Patrick smelled Amy’s perfume the moment he opened the door to his room. He sighed, and almost just closed the door again. He didn’t need to deal with her right now. And frankly, he didn’t have a lot of precious belongings in his cabin worth hanging on to. He was going to toss everything into a bag.
He growled under his breath. He was getting tired of being chased around. With a shove, he pushed the door open hard enough that it knocked against the wall.
Amy was inside, all right. She was clothed at least – after the way she acted in his office, he was half worried she’d be lying in his bed naked. She was in his bed, draped elegantly over the covers, but she still had her ship-suit on.
“Well, Pat. I’m guessing you’ve screwed the pooch?” she asked.
He grunted in reply and picked up a shoulder bag.
“Doc Rosa kicking you off the base?” she asked, sitting up. She seemed startled at the idea. “I wasn’t sure he’d try to go so far. You gonna fight it?”
“I’ll try,” Pat replied. He had some connections on Earth, too. You didn’t get to a position like his without having some friends in some of the right places. He didn’t have the sort of clout Rosa did, but maybe it would help.
“But you don’t think it’s gonna work,” Amy said. It wasn’t a question.
He stopped packing his bag and looked at her. “Wouldn’t be packing my things if I did.”
She flopped backward onto his bed, her arms splayed out, her hair drifting down more slowly than the rest of her in the light gravity, framing her motion. She smiled up at him invitingly. “I did say that if you were just looking to dip your wick, that I was available. Without all the complications.”
Her fingers went to the fastener at the front of her shirt, opening the zipper a half dozen inches. Enough to show that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it.
“Last chance,” she said, a teasing tone to her voice.
She was hot. No denying that. But Patrick wasn’t interested. Between being upset at likely losing his job – and his career in space – and wondering how on Earth he was going to see Carmen again, he just wasn’t in the mood. No matter how inviting Amy’s bosom looked.
But they’d worked together a long time. She was trying to be nice. Or something. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, anyway.
“I have to report to the shuttle right away,” he said. “We’re leaving as soon as I get there. Rosa is probably already there waiting – can’t risk making him more angry right now.”
Amy made a noise in her throat and crossed her arms over her chest, but didn’t say anything. She zipped herself and then sat up. “Pat, more seriously. Be careful, this run. Earth is getting nasty.”
He looked around the room, only half paying attention to her words. He was pretty sure he had everything that he really needed. Was this the last time he would see this room? Was this the last day he would stand on the moon? The idea filled him with dread.
“Nasty how?” he asked absently.
“Riots. Militias. People doing what they can to stay alive,” Amy replied. “Be careful.”
He stepped close and offered her a handshake. “I will. Thanks.”
She stood up and took his hand, but instead of shaking it she pulled him into an embrace instead. “Be safe down there,” she whispered into his ear.
Then she let him go and fled his room without another word.
The room was still around him. It felt sterile now, with his few belongings tucked into a bag. He glanced around once more to see if there was anything else he should take with him, but nothing jumped out at him. He wasn’t the sort of man who felt the need to surround himself with tons of personal belongings, anyway. People who needed things around them tended to do poorly in the cramped confines of a space station, ship, or lunar base anyway.
He left the room and shut the door.
The hallway from his room to the ship was oddly clear of traffic. Usually he would have run into someone on the way, but today – not a soul. Just as well, really. He didn’t want to see anyone. How could he explain that he probably wasn’t coming back from this trip? What reason could he give – an angry father, upset that he kissed the man’s daughter? Anger burned in his gut. They weren’t in high school. And he wasn’t some creep out to deflower Carmen and run off. He liked her. Cared about her.
And now he was losing her. The thought hit him like a punch in the gut.
He reached the ship and powered up the engines. He’d only worked his way halfway through the checklist before Dr. Rosa’s voice came over the radio.
“I am aboard and ready to leave. Please expedite our departure.”
Patrick ground his teeth together. Like that wasn’t what he was already doing. He rushed his way through the rest of the pre-flight list as quickly as he could and still be safe. Damn the man if he thought Patrick was going to skip steps just to get off the ground ten minutes faster! But he finished soon enough. Too soon, really.
Patrick looked out through the cockpit windows at the moon’s landscape. He tried to soak up every detail that he could, memorize every shadow and highlight. He loved this place.
He looked over at the domes, and saw the dome that housed Carmen’s cabin. He wondered if she was still there. Was she crying? Was she safe? He wouldn’t be here to protect her, or hold her when the tears got away from her next time.
Patrick thought he was going to miss Carmen even more than the moon. Which was strange to him… He never thought he’d feel that way about anyone.
No help for it now. The only help he might find would be on Earth, when he’d have to fight for his right to return. He hit the thrusters and the shuttle lifted off from the ground, burning brightly as he plugged in the course to return to Earth.
* * *
Carmen sat in her room a while, trying to soak up the shock of it all. One minute she had been basking in the warmth of Patrick’s arms, and the next her father was in her room, and sending Patrick away. She’d heard the thrusters of the shuttle’s takeoff. There wasn’t anything she could have done to deter her father right now, not without getting Patrick into even more trouble than she already had. She felt guilty enough about that as it was! If only she’d listened when he first pulled back! He was so sweet about that, too, not wanting to take advantage of her. The thought made her smile. Like it hadn’t been her, kissing him!
That thought brought her back around to her father again. He’d barged in here, unasked, without so much as a knock on the door. He’d been damned near irrational over the incident. OK, lack of sleep excused some of it. She could hope that he would be thinking more clearly by the time he reached Earth – if he actually slept during the trip. Somehow, she thought he would use the time to catch up on his reading instead.
But some of it was just his paternal nature taking over. There wasn’t anything she could do about that, not directly. But what about taking a round-about approach?
She hopped up from the bed and sat down at her desk chair, powering up the console there. She wanted the full size screen and keyboard for this. Her father said that Earth had sent up enough data on this immune person to look promising. If it looked promising, then there were lab results – maybe even more. Worth a look.
Carmen opened the lab work folders and searched for the new files, but they were nowhere to be seen. Which meant her father hadn’t bothered to add them to the lab folder before he left. They were still in his personal folders, or maybe even still in his email. Carmen exhaled, wondering if he’d done that by accident, because he was so exhausted – or deliberately, to keep her out of the data? The latter made no real sense. He should want the team to have access right away. But if he wasn’t thinking clearly, nothing was certain.
She punched up the email connection on the local server and entered her father’s user name – easy enough, it was in every email he’d sent, and she’d gotten enough of those. Somewhat harder was the password, but even that wasn’t too difficult. She’d guessed
his email password years ago. She’d never told him that she knew, and never said what a stupid password it was, even though she had wanted to so badly! Her uncharacteristic restraint would pay dividends today if he hadn’t changed the thing.
Carmen typed the password into her console. Miranda – her mother’s name, dead for ten years. But Carmen’s father had never so much as dated again, at least as far as she knew. The password was a dead giveaway. If the man ever entertained romantic notions with another woman (and she wished he would), then he would have changed the thing.
But he hadn’t. His email opened for her, and the top message was from the World Health Organization, on Earth. Complete with a whole bunch of attached folders. She downloaded them all to her console, and carefully logged out of his email. No sense leaving traces that would let him know his account was compromised.
The WHO had sent her father a wealth of examinations and data. She scanned the initial medical reports. The man – a teenage boy, really – had been found in the quarantine zone, showing some of the early signs of the illness. He’d been taken to a treatment facility, which was basically a big tent city where soldiers were escorting the sick so that volunteer medical personnel could watch over them while they died.
But this one didn’t die. He got better.
That got everyone’s attention quickly. They didn’t have any survivors from this virus. Not one person lived through it. Some people lasted a while – the longest was a few weeks. But no one got better after becoming ill. At first they thought he had simply been sick with something else. But no – when they tested his blood for antibodies to the asteroid virus, there they were.
The antibodies that no other human had been able to build, and which might make creating a cure possible. Carmen could see why her father was so excited. Almost, she could excuse him barging into her room without knocking first. This was exciting stuff. The sort of thing you pray for, as a virologist. The virulence of the virus itself was working for them, in this case. With a less lethal virus, it might take a lot longer to find someone who was immune. But with everyone who caught the virus dying, the one in a million person who was immune to the thing was like a flower growing in the middle of a fresh-cut lawn.
She opened some of the other attachments. The doctors on Earth had done their homework on this guy. They had electron micrographs of the virus trying to crack into a small sample of the teen’s blood. She watched the images flick by her screen – really, it was a collection of still images, not a video. But it played out the virus’s attempt to invade his cells. She watched as the virus effectively broke into his cell and injected its DNA. The cell followed the new instructions and started manufacturing new virus.
And then along rolled an antibody cell – which enveloped the cell and killed it. It looked like the boy had somehow gotten the lucky straw, and simply had better antibodies to deal with this thing. Which didn’t really make sense. Antibodies were created by the body as a reaction to an invader. All of the patients she’d seen had developed antibodies. They just didn’t work fast enough to stop the virus before it spread through the body, out of control. So what was different about this kid? She had a sense that the doctors who’d examined him had missed something, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
She pulled up some stills she had made, back on Earth, from another patient. This patient had died. There was the virus again, infecting the cell. The cell began making new virus, just like in the other images. And there was an antibody, swooping in to kill the infected cell and stop the virus! But before the antibody could swallow the infected cell, new virus sprouted all over the cell membrane and broke away. The cell was destroyed, but not before dozens of new viruses were released.
Carmen flicked back to the boy. She played the images one after another, chewing a fingernail. She ran both sets of images side by side, carefully matching the time stamps. One thing became very clear – the boy’s antibodies weren’t any faster than anyone else’s. So why was he still alive?
She looked closely at the cell, right before the antibody swallowed it. No virus escaped from the boy’s cell. The cell had built plenty of new virus – she could see it breaking through the membrane. But none of it broke away from the cell. It was trapped on the cell membrane!
That had to be it. The research she was reading – it was about stopping the virus from breaking free from the cell membrane. About stopping it from spreading to other cells. And this boy’s cells had figured out a way to do that. The key wasn’t in his antibodies. It was in his cells.
Now all she had to do was figure out how his cells were doing it. She sighed, tapping her fingers on her desktop. Easier said that done, with Levins in charge of the lab. He wasn’t going to want lab resources spent on anything except the vaccine they’d been working so hard on. She’d have to find a way to manage him if she was going to have a shot at working on this. But how to do that?
Chapter 12
PATRICK SAT IN the command chair of the shuttle. He’d been ordered to leave the engine hot, which meant by regulation they needed a pilot in the seat. He was stuck here, grinding his teeth together. He glanced down at his tablet. No messages. He’d tried reaching out to some of his contacts, to see if he could stop Dr. Rosa from getting him grounded. But so far nobody had responded, which felt faintly ominous.
At least the flight back to Earth had been uneventful. Rosa had stayed back in the cabin area, with a couple of crew to take care of his needs there. Patrick had stayed forward as much as he could, preferring the solitude of the cockpit. Without Amy here to fly with him, he had a lot more work to do, anyway. He hadn’t wanted to ask Amy to come – too much chance that she’d end up tarred and feathered with the same brush.
He’d landed the bird in Florida. Which was a mess, but not as bad off as Texas. It was the nearest spaceport to Atlanta, where the guy they had to pick up was located. The guy Rosa was going to pick up, anyway. Dr. Rosa had assured Patrick that he’d have a new pilot with him when he returned.
But in the meantime, he had to keep the engines warm, in case they needed to lift off quickly. The virus had spread through the Florida panhandle, and down the west coast. No confirmed cases near the spaceport yet, but people were panicking. It was messy out there, and Patrick could see a few fires burning in the distance. He wasn’t sure what was burning, but it wasn’t good.
The radio squawked. “Package is inbound, arrival in five minutes. Stay at your post with the engines hot until you’re relieved.”
Relieved. As in, replaced. So Rosa had managed to get a new pilot sent up. Damn him. “Roger,” he said into his microphone, he voice flat. What else was he supposed to say?
Patrick daydreamed briefly about just taking the shuttle away. Flying back to the moon. Oh, they’d come get him eventually. But at least he’d get to go home one more time before he was grounded. It was only now sinking in that he was done. His career in space was over. Finished with a kiss.
He couldn’t find it in his heart to be angry with Carmen, though. He knew the risks, and he’d taken the chance anyway. Truth be told, he still wasn’t sure that he missed the moon as much as he missed Carmen.
The shuttle was parked out on a huge landing strip. On the moon, he could just lift off straight up. But here on Earth, the shuttle would have to take off like a jumbo jet, gain altitude like a plane, and then go supersonic to break out of the atmosphere. Off in the distance Patrick could see the control tower, and the buildings where the spaceport’s crew worked. He saw a vehicle leaving the tower, heading toward his ship. That would be the doctor and his new pilot.
Patrick sat there, watching the car get larger through his window. Another few minutes, and it would be at the shuttle. It would drop people off…and pick him up. He ground his teeth together, wishing there was something he could do. Another glance at his tablet showed him nothing new. Nobody was going to save his ass today.
He looked back up at the car, and was startled to see that now there were two vehicles. A big su
pply truck was coming from the hangars to the west. Probably more gear that the doctor needed. Or maybe just random supplies that the powers-that-be wanted to send to the moon. More domes, perhaps. Whatever they were bringing, it didn’t matter much to Patrick now.
Another minute and they’d arrive. He stood up from his console and went aft to open the hatches. No sense delaying the inevitable any longer. He was more used to gliding through these passages than he was walking them, but either way he knew the route by heart. His palm-print opened the passenger hatch, hot air roaring into the cool space within the ship. The day outside was hot – Florida weather at its worst. Patrick blinked a few times in the bright daylight, trying to get his watering eyes to adjust. A black SUV was just pulling up alongside the shuttle. That would be the doctor. He squinted, and saw the big white cargo truck still making its way closer.
A pair of men in dark suits stepped from the front of the SUV. Patrick saw the bulges of pistols and raised his eyebrows. Amy was right. Things really were getting bad down here. One of the men scanned the field. His eyes seemed to linger on the cargo truck for a moment, but then they turned to him, instead.
“Mr. Wynn. I’m to escort you back to the tower after the doctor is aboard,” the guard said. “My partner will be relieving you as pilot.”
Patrick nodded. He had expected as much. The other guard went to the rear door of the vehicle and opened it. Dr. Rosa stepped out, holding one hand at his brow to shelter his eyes from the sun. He saw Patrick and scowled, looking away quickly. Rosa reached back inside the vehicle to assist someone else out.
It was a kid. A teenager, anyway. Kid looked as frightened as anyone Patrick had ever seen. His eyes darted about like a scared bird. Rosa was saying something to the kid, hopefully something reassuring. It seemed to work, whatever he said, because the kid slowly eased his way out of the SUV.
Patrick heard the sound of a diesel engine shifting gears, and looked back over at the cargo truck. It wasn’t downshifting to stop, though – it was still accelerating!
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