There would be a gap near the end of the formation. Annia went into the gengineering program. She assembled a short string that would bridge the broken segment with a logical extrapolation. She fed her extrapolation into the cloud. The processor fitted it into the opening in the genome and pulled together the final pieces.
The cloud contracted down to four strings of viral DNA, the original three and a fourth. Annia leaned close to the revolving image, comparing it to the helices on either side. Not the live plague, and not quite her reconstructed version, it drew heavily from the Charmmes version with the mismatches and human impurities removed—an older version of the live plague sequenced from the victims outside the doors of her lab.
The Charmmes mutation had split off from the first outbreak, the original plague virus.
All of which meant nothing. It gave her nothing she could use, no clue as to how to treat Maycee, no insight into how to stop the plague. Annia rested her closed eyes on the heels of her hands, rubbing away the burning sensation of having stared too long into a holographic monitor field without blinking.
Behind her, the compiler warbled to tell her it had finished incubating the samples. Honeybear stood up and clicked back at the machine. Annia raised her head and stretched her ribs with a deep breath. She had to check the compilation run, see if it matched the DPH results.
The scans confirmed what Solante had told her. None of her DVs had attacked the plague. The domestic virions in their various shapes and sizes should attach to the cells infected by the active plague and inject their own DNA. When the domestic genome began to replicate, it would throw off codon strings that would attach to the plague and block it from reproducing. Instead, the domestic viruses refused even to attach to cells already infected by the wild virus.
Annia leaned her weight back in her seat. Simulations said the plague should be easily disabled by virtually any half-programmed DV, but outside the processor, it just didn't happen. Something about the wild virus blocked its gengineered descendants. A chemical? An enzyme produced by the plague as it replicated? Was it concealing itself from its domestic descendants, or actively blocking them from attaching to infected cells?
If such an agent existed, the DPH would already have found it, but to proceed on the assumption that there was nothing to be found would violate the very foundation of scientific method and—as Maycee would put it—get on Annia's last nerve. She pushed herself up from her seat, shifted the infected bio-sim vials back into the sequencer and programmed the machine to look for unfamiliar chemicals, molecules, enzymes—anything a DV wouldn't have encountered before.
She had no idea what to do next. All she had done was duplicate the effort of the DPH and arrive at the same conclusion they had. There was no way to cure the plague.
Her head ached, and her eyes felt gritty. She probed the lymph nodes under her jaw. They were tender, but not swollen. Annia scooped up Honeybear and draped it over her shoulder. "Come on, we're taking a nap." She dimmed the lights, curled on her side on a cot against the wall and toed off her boots. The drape of her red smock kept her legs warm, and she pulled a corner of thermal sheeting over her shoulder. She had to relax in stages until she reached the rag-limp state that would allow her to stop the endless circles of worry and frustration in her head and let everything go empty and soft.
Sound woke her. The sounds of people in distress came through the walls—anxious murmurs, small cries, techs and orderlies passing instructions among themselves. The patients must be overwhelming the hospital's supply of beds. Nothing Annia could do about it. Mr. Krotoschiner could stir himself to organize the influx, or someone else would, or chaos would drown the hospital, and nothing would make any difference to the suffering plague victims. She swung her legs off the cot and sat up. Her head hurt worse than it had when she laid down, and she itched around her ribs.
Sticking her hand inside her red uniform, she ran her fingers over the bumpy rash just under her arm. She scratched, and the combination of pain and relief almost made her dig her nails deeper before she stopped herself. No point making the situation worse with broken skin and bacterial infections. Not that she would have time to worry about bacterial infections. Even with the plague shutting down her immune system, she would be dead before any bacteriological agent got a foothold.
Honeybear rolled onto its feet and followed Annia to the cabinet where she had seen a packet of stim-tabs. She unpeeled two and stuck them in the hollows just above her collarbones where they would be hidden by the high neck of her uniform. She added four histamine blocks, an anti-pyretic and two pain-blocks, then followed the meds with two bottles of stimulant food-concentrate. She doused herself top to bottom with another layer of anti-septic mist. She'd been using whatever protective gels and washes they'd had at the clinic since she'd seen the first patients, but they hadn't protected her from infection. They might, though, prevent her from spreading the virus herself. Finally, she found a tissue sampler and took a sample from the back of her forearm. She dropped the sampler into her little sequencer. She already knew she had the plague, but it was one more proper procedure that couldn't be neglected.
As the meds began to take effect, Annia raised the lights, rubbed her eyes and pulled up the results from the big sequencer she had set to analyzing the plague-infected bio-sims. The sequencer reported no alien material apart from the plague itself. Annia put the analysis up in her monitor anyway and scanned the rotating data cloud, but she had no better luck than the processor at identifying anything that shouldn't have been there. She hadn't expected to.
So DV tech wouldn't work. She and the DPH were helpless to do anything about the plague. Had the DPH given up? Were they trying to revive the ancient antiviral drugs that gave rise to the immune plagues in the first place? Those drugs had been imperfect to begin with. Viruses mutated so quickly they could evolve immunity to the drugs almost before they were exposed. Drive out the infection in one place, and it cropped up somewhere else more virulent than before.
That left the final solution of the last two outbreaks—firebombs and interdiction, and this time, the plague would spread faster and further with more powerful sublight engines and null-space drives than had been available in the last outbreaks. The frontier worlds would have to be quarantined to keep the plague from reaching them. They could preserve humanity to expand again into a depopulated galaxy. But that wouldn't work either. The outworlds would have spontaneous outbreaks of their own just as Yetfurther had. They were looking at absolute extinction, and there was nothing, nothing that could be done.
Annia had her forehead in her hands and her eyes shut when she heard Elizabeth-Belle's querulous voice in the intake area.
"Are you the one who had me abducted? Can you begin to conceive the legal repercussions of kidnapping a member of the Charmmes family? If anything happens to me, if you so much as make a ransom demand, my family will hunt you through every slum and mudhole in the civilized galaxy. You'll..."
The shrill sound of Elizabeth-Belle's outrage raised Annia's spirits. She couldn't do anything about the plague, but if she could make Elizabeth-Belle's day a little less comfortable, Annia felt she had accomplished something worthwhile. Unfortunately, the outrage wouldn't make Elizabeth-Belle any more cooperative.
Annia left her data rotating in the monitor and went to the door. Opening it, she stepped out between her two guards. "I need her in here," she barked at Mr. Krotoschiner who glared at Elizabeth-Belle with flared nostrils and his too-small face turning red with offended dignity.
He turned his stiff face toward Annia and made a curt gesture in her direction. "In there," he snapped at the three men escorting Elizabeth-Belle. Two of the men in Solante's uniforms held Elizabeth-Belle by her elbows. A third stood behind her, holding a stunner aimed at her back.
Annia rolled her eyes. "You don't have to drag her, and put the flaming stunner down. I need her to answer questions not lie on the floor and twitch."
The man behind Elizabeth-Belle looked
dubious, but he holstered the stunner, taking a cautious step backward as if he thought the woman was going to turn on him with claws and teeth. Elizabeth-Belle pulled her arms free of the other two bulls, and glared at them, then she turned as if she was going to leave the building.
Annia barked, "Don't you dare walk out of here."
Elizabeth-Belle turned back and stamped toward Annia with her face red and hot with anger. "This is your idea, dragging me here. I suppose you think this is an amusing prank to pay me back for not funding your ridiculous little research project. I was ready to give you whatever you wanted, but you had to have it all on your terms."
The two men by Annia's door stepped forward to intercept the other woman before she reached Annia. Elizabeth-Belle would have dwarfed Annia, but the guards effectively halted her charge even if they didn't chill her temper.
"Come in, Elizabeth-Belle. I'm having a problem with my data, and you're the only person besides Cho'en who might be able to help me solve it." She tried not to choke on the words, but she needed Elizabeth-Belle's help, and flattery might soothe the woman's ruffled scales.
Honeybear was watching the monitor, reared up on its hind segments and waving its proboscis at the moving data. Annia scooped it out of the way and pointed at the monitor. "What does that mean to you?"
Elizabeth-Belle glared at Annia and evidently decided she would get out of the hospital full of dying people sooner if she put up an appearance of cooperation. She glanced at the monitor and condescended to flick her eyes over the data. Something caught her eye. She reached behind her, groping with one hand.
Annia pushed a chair at her.
The other woman pulled herself close to the monitor, and leaned in, studying the circling data cloud. She found the waldo field and made adjustments. The cloud condensed into the three genomes Annia had used to assemble the model for the last plague outbreak. She enlarged the older plague genome, then compared it to the Charmmes variation. "Where did you get this?"
"Which?"
"This one, obviously," Elizabeth-Belle snapped, waving her hand at the Charmmes variation. "I can see how you derived the original genome. Where did this come from?" Apparently the Charmmes genius wasn't over-rated. Elizabeth-Belle had apparently read the entire data cloud in minutes where Annia had plodded over weeks to build it.
"Haven't you seen it before?" Annia said.
"Obviously, I haven't, or I wouldn't ask."
"I sequenced it from you and Jordan-Kyle and Maycee and Johanna-Eunice. You're all carrying dormant or mangled fragments."
"That's ridiculous. We would have found this if it was there."
Annia retrieved another chair. "Then why haven't you seen it before?"
"I told you..."
Annia interrupted her. "I'm sure your gene-techs knew all about it when your quantum talents began to manifest. What I want to know is why they would hide it from the rest of you, because they did, didn't they? They don't want anybody to know how closely you are associated with the Century Plague. Even the Charmmes family couldn't have survived if the civilized galaxy thought you were the cause of the second outbreak. Or the third."
She'd wondered if Elizabeth-Belle would lie or bluster, but the woman seemed honestly puzzled. "That..." she jerked her head at the intake lounge outside the lab, "Has nothing to do with us or with Century Plague."
Annia put her hand in the waldo and enlarged the older plague genome.
Elizabeth-Belle looked away.
Annia put the genome from her live samples up beside the older organism. Then she put the Charmmes variation between them.
Elizabeth-Belle swiped her hand through the monitor, sending the image spinning into static before it reformed. "It's nothing to with us," she repeated.
"Maycee wouldn't argue against the obvious," Annia said. "Neither would Cho'en. Not even Jordan-Kyle. Any half-trained tech could see your family is carrying a retro-viral fossil that did something to you before it went dormant." She deleted the two intact versions of the plague and replaced them with the blended Charmmes genome with the quantum mutations highlighted in yellow. "I'm sure your techs back then, and your Mother Louise..."
"It would have been Mother Eunice," Elizabeth-Belle muttered. Her eyes had strayed back to the monitor.
"I'm sure they had a good reason at the time," Annia said, trying to talk to Elizabeth-Belle the way she would speak to Maycee or Cho'en—as one reasonable person to another, "...but you can see what this means if we can't stop it, and we need..." She had almost said, I need, but no, she couldn't imply that she, Annia, could solve a problem the illustrious Charmmes family had been living with for over a century. "We need more information if we are going to build a DV that will attack this."
Elizabeth-Belle shrugged. "We can't. We don't have the equipment, the resources, the time. If I could contact Charmmes Labs on Firstep..."
Annia resisted the drag of the other woman's fatalism. "Well, we don't, and we can't, but if we give up, we die, so we may as well make the effort."
Elizabeth-Belle said, "We won't die."
Annia started to argue, then she realized the other woman had said, "We won't die."
A DV wouldn't attack a cell infected with the plague. The Charmmeses carried their own version of the plague in their DNA. Would the wild plague attack a cell that was already a carrier, or would only the active, replicating plague provide that...she cringed to call it protection.
The wild plague had attacked its own hosts, the first children who presented with the active infection, but the plague had already been within their cells, so when it separated from the native DNA, it didn't have to re-infect the other cells in the host body, but the children's parents would have a dormant version in their genes. Had the parents of the procreationist children come down with the plague? She couldn't remember. The adults had stopped coming to the clinic when their children started to show the infection.
Annia went to the door and asked her guards, "Get somebody who can tell me if the adults in the procreationist community are getting sick with the plague."
She returned to Elizabeth-Belle. "I want tissue samples."
The other woman glared at her. "Of what?"
"You, Jordan-Kyle, Maycee, Cho'en, but I only have you." She had her hand on a tissue sampler, and Elizabeth-Belle looked like she might resist, but she finally extended her arm to Annia.
She sat and watched Annia feed the samples into the compiler and program it to test the live plague on the Charmmes tissue. If people carrying the inert viral fragments in their DNA couldn't be reinfected, it should be possible to inoculate people the same way Annia had used the DVs to alter Tora and Liam back to something more closely resembling a "human" genotype. Not that it would be easy. A complete genetic alteration affecting every cell in the body—and it would have to be virtually every cell—would kill a percentage of patients. Tora and Liam had survived the transformation due to their tougher-than-human design. A natural human population could lose as many as eight percent of its members. On the other hand, the plague invariably killed one-hundred percent of its host population until something in its environment triggered its dormancy cycle again.
If, indeed, the Charmmeses or the Procreationist parents of the child vectors were immune, the DPH must already be building the DV to at least begin inoculating the population of Yetfurther. It would at least give people a better chance of survival than the plague itself.
Annia rocked in her chair, forgetting Elizabeth-Belle's presence for a moment. How many parents would let their children be inoculated knowing the risks? Could enough healthy adults be inoculated to provide a herd immunity for their children? No, she calculated, there would still be at least thirty percent mortality in the unprotected children. It was still more chance than the children would get in a completely unprotected population.
It wasn't good enough. Even if it was the only defense they had, defense alone wasn't good enough. There had to be some way to insert a DV behind the plague's defenses and
attack it directly.
Dropping out of her own thoughts and back into the real world, Annia turned on Elizabeth-Belle. "Your family built DV technology on top of the second outbreak. Did they know what was in their DNA?"
"Of course they..." Elizabeth-Belle stopped, evidently torn between defying the statement and refusing the question.
Annia said, "I know you received a mutated strain that couldn't rebuild itself when it got the signal to come out of dormancy. It was mangled in the attempt and ended up re-splicing itself into a different part of your genome. It did something to your latent quantum talents."
Elizabeth-Belle tightened her jaws as if she were afraid a reply would force its way past her teeth.
Annia continued. "Your strain tried to become active decades before the true plague. I don't know if you had short generations like the Procreationists, or if its mutation affected its trigger mechanism. Maybe something else triggered it. It doesn't matter. Then the second outbreak. Maybe you were immune, maybe you just weren't exposed before the planetburners razed the infected worlds, but you defied the interdictions and saved a sample of the plague to study."
"We kept the samples we had already taken. We were trying to find a way to cure the plague or immunize against it," Elizabeth-Belle snapped.
Annia shrugged. "I'd have done the same. Even if the plague really was eradicated that time, another one might emerge that was just as deadly. So you gengineered the virus and turned it into a medical technology. What I need to know is how you missed the re-activation trigger. Why didn't your gengineers realize the plague had to have a carrier population to carry it over into its next active cycle?"
Elizabeth-Belle glowered.
"Did they know?"
Elizabeth-Belle looked away and folded her arms. "How could I know what they knew or didn't? Cousin Vernor-Mark might know. Mother Louise maybe. The matriarchs might have passed something down among themselves."
Farenough: Strangers Book 2 Page 16