Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  Annia wanted to scream and stamp her feet and throw things. Why couldn't the flaming plague have stuck to its timeline and given her twenty years to make love with Ferus and sit on the dock and watch the water with Maycee and Cho'en before she had to pick up this weight again? She pulled together all the discipline she had learned in a lifetime of being invisible, unremarkable, unnoticed. "This is a hospital. I'm sorry we don't have all the amenities in place yet, but we'll make your father comfortable as quickly as we can."

  She helped the young man carry his father to what she had designated in her mind as the waiting room, then she ran up the stairs, hoping her rush wouldn't further alarm the man. She was already shouting for the administrator as she bolted the last few steps. "Mr. Krotoschiner, where are my doctors? Where are my beds? My equipment?"

  The second floor had been sectioned into small rooms on either side of a corridor running from back to front of the building with a window at the far end overlooking the street. She passed a cross-corridor and stopped to shout, "Mr. Krotoschiner." She'd be scrapped for a bad brood before she called him administrator after the way he'd made such a fetish of it.

  "We have patients," she shouted. "Where are my staff?"

  Mr. Krotoschiner emerged from a door at the far end of the hall near the window. "Ms. Annia, we are not ready for patients. Please return to your laboratory. I have arranged for your live viral samples, and they will be here soon."

  "We have two patients downstairs. In a few hours, we will have more than we can handle. I want everybody working on beds, triage, sedatives, analgesics, antipyretics, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines..." She didn't know how many people Solante had on tap to staff the hospital, but he'd sent fifteen competent med-techs to her camp the night of the riot, and she'd start with that. "What about the men building walls downstairs? Put them to work doing something useful. Beds. Every spare space we can find. What's going on upstairs? Get them working on it, too. Where are the techs?"

  "Ms. Annia, we don't have admission protocols, billing protocols..."

  She all but jumped into his face. "If we flaming well survive this plague, you can flaming well try to bill the whole planet, but right now, you will get this hospital ready for patients right flaming now, or I will flaming well walk to Mr. Solante's house and tell him to flaming well have you shot in the flaming street."

  She stopped, startled by her own vehemence.

  The man's too-small face went deep red. "Ms. Annia," he began as if he meant to take her to task for insulting him.

  "Now," Annia barked. "Now, now, now." She sounded like a spoiled child screaming for a candy, and she didn't care. She didn't want to be here, didn't want to be fighting an impossible plague, didn't want to be squabbling with a petty thug and bully over whether patient care took precedence over data and procedures.

  From behind her, someone called her name. Annia whirled, prepared to include a new target in her tirade.

  She recognized her driver of the morning—the man whose arm she had set. "I'll see to it, Ms. Annia. There's medical supplies in storage, and we'll put together something for beds. Some of these engineers could be put to that."

  "Well..." She wasn't quite prepared to abandon her tantrum.

  The administrator said, "If that is settled to your satisfaction, Ms. Annia, you have your duties to return to."

  Her temper, briefly calmed, began to to boil again, but this time, she re-asserted her control and turned back to him. "Yes, I do have duties. The sooner I am satisfied that my patients will be made comfortable, the sooner I can go back to what I am supposed to be doing here."

  Leaving the administrator to whatever business he considered most essential to a hospital, Annia returned to the ground floor and the patients she had left there. She found a double handful of people, adults and children, all of them showing the rash on arms and necks. She slumped. Why hadn't Mr. Krotoschiner thought to provide staff? Had he really thought the plague would wait for him to build walls and develop protocols?

  Her driver joined her with one of the engineers who said, "Doctor, what are you looking for us to do?"

  She turned from the people in the waiting room. "Beds," she said. "Give me two surgical rooms, two examination rooms and the rest beds." Beds and beds and beds. "And we've got to have med-techs and orderlies..."

  The engineer said, "I'll put my people to work on beds. I can't help you with the rest."

  The driver said, "I'll get that taken care of, Ms. Annia."

  She couldn't think of anything to say. She went to the nearest patient, a middle-aged man in his seventies leaning on his wife. Annia scanned them both, categorized the man as mid-level infection, his wife in the early stages—bad enough, but others would be worse. She worked her way through the people in the admissions area. Two more plague victims came in, then a handful. She tried to lock her mind against the knowledge that many of them, most of them, maybe all of them would be dead before she could assemble a cure.

  Solante's hired med-techs arrived in twos and threes. Some looked grim, others clearly wanted to walk straight out again at the sight of the sick people. One man said, "I thought there were supposed to be injuries. I didn't come here to nurse plague victims."

  Annia's temper, already hovering just above a boil, came close to eruption. One of Solante's bulls jabbed the man between the shoulders with the butt of his rifle, knocking him a few staggering steps forward. "Take it up with Mr. Solante. Later."

  The protester caught his balance. "I don't owe him enough to get myself killed by a Breeder disease."

  The guard grinned. "Could be worse: plague will only kill you."

  Annia caught the arm of her driver as he went past. "How many are like him?" She tipped her head toward the cowed medic.

  The driver shrugged. "He owes Mr. Solante a debt."

  "That's as bad as indenture."

  Another shrug. "It was a big debt."

  Annia couldn't do any more as a doctor than the techs could. It came down to getting patients into beds as fast as the engineers could manufacture them, and keeping them comfortable with drugs to suppress the symptoms. She returned to her lab and rested her head in her hands while Honeybear groomed its toe-feet on the table beside her.

  Presume Solante and the DPH were right and the DVs really weren't attacking the plague virus. Presume her simulated plague virus was accurate. What did it mean that her simulated DVs appeared to function correctly while the real ones compiled by the DPH failed? If she were right about the origin of DV technology, then the DV was refusing to attack the plague because it reacted to the wild virus. That should not be possible. A domestic virus could be programmed to attack any other DV. How was the parent virus different from its domestic descendants? The DV's were neutered. They could reproduce a specified number of generations, then they self-destructed. Was that a modification of the plague's dormancy cycle? If the misbegotten Charmmes gengineers had found and used the dormancy cycle, how could they have missed its significance? Dormancy implied eventual reactivation. Wouldn't someone have thought to make a note that the virus might be able to reactivate itself? Or hadn't they realized the plague hid in the host's DNA?

  One of the med-techs put her head in at the door. "Doctor, you wanted these?" She slid a null-gravity trolley into the room. Racks and racks of tiny blood vials, every one full of live virus.

  Annia dropped her hands from her head. "In here." She met the trolley halfway and pulled it to the feed trays at the back of the compiler. "Help me load."

  The tech helped her fill the trays and store the unused racks of blood nearby. When they were done, Annia finally began the first compilation run. The compiler would manufacture DV samples, extract the infected blood from its containers and inject both viruses into bio-sim capsules that mimicked the functions of the human body. Then those vials would have to be cultured while the domestic virus attacked its wild cousin. If the real DVs worked like the simulated versions, she should have eighty different ways to cure the plag
ue.

  She wouldn't be able to set up a second test run until she had analyzed the first one. While she waited, she injected a dozen tribbles with the plague virus. She wanted to have a well-established infection ready when she ran her first live-test outside the bio-vials.

  She spent half an hour looking into malignancies and infectious agents that resisted DV treatment. None of those gave her any insight into the plague problem. The DVs in question had attacked their programmed targets and failed due to inadequate programming. If Solante had described the problem accurately, the DVs weren't recognizing the plague at all.

  But Annia had an example of a DV-resistant condition that didn't appear in the public literature. She found her sequenced gene-maps from Maycee and her cousins. According to Maycee, the Charmmes gengineers had been unable to design a DV that would modify their defective genes. Did the Charmmes family have any records of those attempts? Had they analyzed why they had failed? She went to the door of her lab. The guards had changed while she worked. She selected the man on her right. "Excuse me."

  She stared at the side of his head until he seemed to feel his skin start to blister and finally looked at her. "I need to talk to someone from my camp. Cho'en Charmmes or her cousin Elizabeth-Belle."

  "Can't help you." He faced front again.

  She tried to increase the temperature of her stare. "Then find somebody who can help me so that I don't have to explain to Mr. Solante why I wasn't able to build him the plague cure he wants." Anyone would think Solante hired his people from the Federation. She'd met drones with more initiative than his employees. What did they think would happen if they accidentally used their frontal cortices? She remembered the girl with the mutilated face. Maybe lack of initiative was a survival trait.

  The thing to do with a balky clone was to simplify its choices. She said, "I am looking right at the com clip on your collar. You can send for Mr. Krotoschiner..." she still wasn't going to use his title, "...or send someone to my camp to ask..." she paused to emphasize asking as opposed to arresting or assaulting, "...Cho'en or Elizabeth-Belle to come here. If anyone complains about you passing along my request, just refer them to me."

  He huffed and squeezed the collar-clip with an expression that suggested he was placating her by indulging her unreasonable demands. The administrator came with bad grace and Annia had to persuade him she absolutely, positively could not cure the plague without consulting with one of the Charmmes cousins. She endured more eye-rolling and huffing as if Mr. Krotoschiner and the guard both had better things to do than to help her cure the plague that was about to kill them, but Mr. Krotoschiner finally stalked off to get his hands one of the Charmmes cousins. A mental image of Elizabeth-Belle being manhandled and abducted by Solante's bulls made Annia smile. She doubted they would be impressed by the illustrious Charmmes name.

  Annia went back into the lab and checked the progress of the compiler. It had finished the first hundred and twenty vials. Three-hundred, eighty to go and then at least another hour waiting for the samples to incubate. She switched the monitor from the compiler's progress back to her data files, and set the monitor to random display. Then she leaned her cheek on her hand, staring at the data rotating past her eyes in the monitor.

  She couldn't bring her mind into focus to pull all those scattered bits of information together into a coherent hypothesis. Like the plague secreted into its host's genes, the solution had to be dormant in the problem, ready to reassemble itself when it received the signal that reactivated it. She just needed that trigger.

  She balanced on the edge of sleep, sometimes teetering so far she would blink awake, realizing she had missed a section of the rotating display, but it hardly mattered. She wasn't looking for anything in particular, not even an inspiration. She just had to be doing something while the compiler worked, and she was too tired to do anything more than this.

  A string of symbols drifted through the monitor field. She recognized a section of DNA from the jerryrigged version of the plague she had strung together from the pieces scattered among the chromosomes of her first carrier population. Annia sat up. She'd thought she was looking at the Charmmes mutation, but she must have drifted into sleep and re-awakened after the monitor switched its display to her original plague data. She double-checked. No, she hadn't missed anything. This was part of the Charmmes mutation. She froze the data column and expanded the Charmmes mutation sequences from Maycee and Elizabeth-Belle. They both carried the fragment. Johanna-Eunice had it. Even Jordan-Kyle—the piece that triggered the active cycle of the virus.

  Curse of the Black Man, she hadn't thought to have the sequencer look for the plague in the Charmmes samples; she had been looking for the mutation.

  She needed a sequencer, but she had the new one working on DV variations. She searched the central processor and found the old sequencer Mr. Hollin—Ferus—had found for her. Working from her monitor, she turned the sequencer on, cleared its inactive tasks and uploaded the Charmmes data and the full plague genome. The little machine could run five processes at a time, so Annia assigned each process one of the four members of the Charmmes family from Yetfurther to check against the plague.

  Annia watched for a while as the sequencer read codon pairs and checked them against the plague chromosome. A segment of DNA on the sixteenth chromosome blinked yellow. Annia enlarged. A snippet of what had appeared to be an intron tucked between two active alleles matched a piece of the plague string that Annia had tentatively assigned to the plague's splicing function. A second piece changed color—this one green, a near-match, close to something on the plague chromosome but not identical. Gradually, twelve fragments turned yellow, and another fifteen turned green as the sequencer matched them to pieces of the plague, distributed among the 23 pairs of human chromosomes as if the virus had tried to go into its dormant state hidden among the host's genes.

  Even sequencing the samples from all four of Annia's Charmmes subjects, the processor couldn't assemble a complete virus. The Charmmes plague contained the activation trigger, but the re-assembly sequences were mangled. The Charmmes plague wouldn't be able to re-activate itself.

  Among the green strings, the near-matches, half of them appeared in the Charmmes mutation where fragments of viral DNA had intermingled with functioning human alleles and changed the way something in the host brains worked.

  The Charmmes genome had probably already contained the rudiments of the most common quantum talents. Maybe some family members were prone to very accurate hunches, or objects fell over when a teenage girl got angry or frustrated. Some combination of the plague fragments had magnified those traits.

  No wonder Maycee's mind-bank was raising a fuss over the resurgence of the plague. It wasn't just a galactic catastrophe, it was them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The plague genome reassembled from the fragments in the Charmmes DNA wasn't Annia's version of the plague or the version she had sequenced from her live samples, but it was recognizably Century Plague. Annia put the three models side by side by side in her monitor—the live version between her original simulation and the ragged reconstruction of what she thought of as the Charmmes plague—and watched them rotate and revolve around each other in the field. Then the monitor exploded the three virus models into their component alleles, matching and comparing them piece by piece and pair by pair.

  Annia tracked the fragments through the field in three dimensions, reading strings and genes and extrapolating their functions. That gene there in the live virus controlled the reconstruction of the viral shell when the infected host cell began to replicate the viral DNA. The Charmmes version lacked the gene. Had that been the original mistake when the virus infected the Charmmes host? It would have tried to reactivate and been unable to escape the host cell, then, forced to remain in the host DNA, it had attempted to re-integrate with the host and mangled its code in the process, joining the roughly ten-percent of the human genome that consisted of viral fossils too damaged to escape the host DNA.
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  But some of those damaged pieces had altered the host, and that wasn't uncommon, either. Viruses had been the driving force of evolution since they had organized themselves into the first single-celled organisms, repeating the process on thousands of planets, sometimes using different amines, but generally compatible with human biology.

  She slipped her hand into the waldo control field and touched one of those alleles with her finger. With her thumb, she touched another piece.

  The processor rejected the instruction to associate the two. The two pieces didn't match closely enough. If Annia had been counting codons, she would have agreed with the processor, but she knew with electric certainty that those two pieces of different genomes were a match no matter what the processor indicated. Annia twitched a finger to force the connection. The indicated pair began to rotate around each other within the orbiting cloud of exploded data, and the processor measured the similarities and differences between them.

  Annia picked another segment out of the field and linked it with the two she had already isolated. It was a part of the active Charmmes mutation, but Annia thought she could see how it had derived from bits and pieces of her simulated plague fused with one of many genes that controlled perceptual filtering in the human brain.

  The processor analyzed her latest input, and the shape of the cloud changed. The new configuration suggested another connection, this time between the live virus and Annia's simulation, and she recognized a common viral mutation pattern from one of the old immune plagues she had studied in her medical training, which meant she could discard that piece and link this piece and that one to the Charmmes plague variation.

  The processor finished analyzing her input and altered its algorithm to accommodate her thinking. If she were wrong, the output would be nonsense and she would have to go back to the original three samples.

  The processor took bits and pieces from each plague variation and, moving them to the center of the cloud, began to build a genome. Annia reached into the waldo to single out a gene she thought should fit the new structure, but the processor anticipated her and moved it into position on the forming string.