Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  "What about your mind-bank? Wouldn't they know? They're the link between the family and the plague. Can't someone ask them?"

  Elizabeth-Belle bolted to her feet, her eyes wide with outrage. "They have nothing to do with this. Nothing. You have no right to talk about them." She made "you" sound like an epithet. Maybe a general term for anyone not a member of the scintillant Charmmes family.

  Annia scrubbed her hands over her eyes and up her forehead. She wanted Maycee—someone with the will and wit to make herself useful. She straightened. "I don't care what anyone did or knew then or now. I'm just looking for something that might give me some idea of how to get a domestic virus to attack the plague. You're the only member of your family I can ask, and you have to be able to tell me something I can use."

  Elizabeth-Belle still bristled with offended pride. "You are wasting your time."

  Annia crossed her arms. "I don't have anything better to do."

  The other woman looked into the empty air over Annia's shoulder. "It took dozens of Charmmes gengineers to design the most significant medical technology since tissue regeneration. You..." there was that word again, "...will never do anything to rival that achievement."

  And Elizabeth-Belle would probably rather die from the plague herself than see it happen. Annia said, "I don't have to. I just have to find a way to use your technology to solve a problem no one has seen before. If your gengineers anticipated the way the DVs react to the plague, they might have left you instructions for how to deal with it."

  "I wouldn't know," Elizabeth-Belle huffed, as if she couldn't be expected to be aware of mundane technical data.

  The compiler warbled to tell Annia it had finished its incubation run. She pulled the results to her monitor as someone knocked on the lab door. "Go get that," she ordered, then remembered who she was talking to.

  Elizabeth-Belle looked as if someone had spat on her.

  Annia sighed. "Fine. I'll get it. You analyze this data." She left Elizabeth-Belle at the monitor and went to the lab door. When she opened it, her driver waited on the other side. "Ms. Annia, that question you wanted an answer for...it's yes. The parents are getting sick along with the kids."

  That meant no immunity, not for the procreationists at least. Maybe for the Charmmeses... Annia turned around, but Elizabeth-Belle's expression, half shock and half offense, told her the Charmmes mutation didn't confer protection to its carriers either. Well, tinkering the entire human race would have been a desperate bid for bare species survival. They needed a cure, not a last stand.

  Annia thanked the driver and returned to the work station. Elizabeth-Belle looked stunned. Had she really been so sure she—her family—would be immune? "Do you have any way to contact the mind-bank?" Annia asked.

  Elizabeth-Belle kept her eyes on the monitor. "I'm not a dreamer." She might have been confessing a weakness of character or a physical deformity.

  If Elizabeth-Belle couldn't do it, then Jordan-Kyle was out of the question, and Cho'en didn't seem to be linked to the mind-bank either. Maycee's explanation of the relationship between the mind-bank and the gaeans suggested the gaeans weren't affected by the merged human minds. Annia wanted to shout at Elizabeth-Belle until the woman understood this was her fault, hers and her family's, for designing the DV tech without leaving clear records, for refusing to take Annia's research seriously, and for stunning Maycee and breaking her fragile control over her damaged brain. She wanted to beat and beat and beat until Elizabeth-Belle understood what she had done to the galaxy.

  Honeybear rippled across the projector under the monitor field, interrupting the data cloud, and reared up at Annia's shoulder, clicking for attention. She ran her hand down its length, testing the resilience of its hydraulic chambers. It felt firmer. Maybe its sacks were recovering from the damage done by the parasites.

  The embalming gel should have killed all the amoebae by now. Annia should return the catpil to its family. But the little girl, Rhea, had been infected. Honeybear probably didn't have a family to return to. Feeling sorry for the animal, she scratched behind its lung vents. No more caustic fluid leaking into the stiff, smooth hair.

  "That animal is unsanitary," Elizabeth-Belle said.

  Honeybear had left a few hairs on the worktop. Annia brushed them onto the floor. She supposed she could release Honeybear and let it find a catpil tangle to live with. She didn't know if a catpil would be accepted into a new herd or pack.

  Honeybear had been in the clinic, surrounded by infected humans, coming in contact with shed virions, probably coated with the disease. Annia looked down at the animal. Too late to put it down. Annia had kept her hands coated in anti-septic spray-glove when handling victims, but she could hardly have escaped exposure. She would have to decontaminate the animal, though. What would you use to bathe a catpil? Water would get in its lung vents and poison it. Cho'en would know if Annia could find her wherever she was.

  Could the plague survive in a catpil host? It wouldn't be able to splice itself into the alien amines in the catpil DNA, but it might survive for months or years in the circulatory fluid or the rubbery muscular tissue. Annia reached for the tissue sampler. Honeybear twisted around to watch what she was doing and squeaked protests as Annia took samples from its body and fluids.

  "What is the point of that?" Elizabeth-Belle demanded.

  Annia fed the tissue into the sequencer. "I have to do something."

  "Wasting time."

  "We have nothing better to do with it. In the last outbreak, they thought the virus was being carried by animals and plants. It's why they firebombed."

  Elizabeth-Belle's fair skin couldn't go much paler, but her lips looked a little white. "They can't do that here."

  "The local parliament tried to firebomb us once already," Annia reminded her. She returned to her monitor and programmed the sequencer to search for the plague in the catpil samples. If she didn't find it there, she would try to deliberately infect the samples with the virus. She considered sending someone to collect samples from all the flora and fauna in the area, but decide it could wait. If the native ecosystem could carry the organism, it would be evident in the catpil tissue.

  Elizabeth-Belle said, "Mother Louise and Cousin George-Mark won't allow it. There are still family here."

  Would it kill the woman to apply her supposedly superior mind to solving the problem rather than complaining about it? "If we can't design a cure you'll be just as dead from plague as from planetburners."

  "Cousin Ethan-George at Charmmes labs will have a cure long before you could dream of one."

  "Good," Annia replied. "Meanwhile, we have a dying population staring the planetburners right in the firing ports and no sign of a miracle from your illustrious family." Maybe Elizabeth-Belle was some use after all. At least her combination of fatalism and monomania irritated Annia out of her own sense of futility.

  Annia said, "The DV won't attach to a cell already infected with the parent plague. I can't find the signaling mechanism that warns it off. What is it? Where is it? How do we bypass it? If we can't do that, then how else do you get a DV into an infected cell? Or kill the plague organism before it infects the host cells to begin with?"

  Elizabeth-Belle huffed. "A DV can't attack another virus outside the cell. You have to block its replication inside the host cells and modify the host immune system to attack the plague in the bloodstream."

  Annia scrubbed her forehead. "The whole point of an immune plague is that it disables the immune system first."

  "I know that." Elizabeth-Belle glared at Annia.

  Annia glowered back. "If a DV won't work, then what will?"

  "Nothing."

  Flush it, the woman would rather be right than live. Everyone at Charmmes Labs, assuming they even knew the plague had reappeared, was probably sitting around talking about how impossible it would be to cure.

  Annia said, "In the clinic, we found a baby who was infected with an amoeba that came from a sick catpil. The amoeba couldn't feed on th
e human tissue, but it kept itself alive by consuming the plague virions."

  Elizabeth-Belle shrugged. "The plague is infecting humans, not catpils."

  Annia checked the progress of the sequencer. It hadn't finished its analysis, but already, it had found the virus in Honeybear's tissue. The monitor displayed images of the plague virions bumping against the catpil cells, unable to attach to the outer membrane. "The virus isn't using the catpil tissue to replicate."

  Elizabeth-Belle scanned the monitor. "Of course it isn't. I just told you it's human-specific."

  But that amoeba had been able to survive in the baby's body once the virus had shut down her immune system, and it had been able to absorb the plague virus, digest the capsid and break down the amines in the RNA.

  Something like a jolt of electricity from a low-power stun made Annia jerk straight up in her seat. "We need a virophage."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "What virophage?"

  She ignored Elizabeth-Belle. Annia had been so focused on attacking the virus directly with a targeted DV, she had never considered invoking a natural predator. The amoeba from Honeybear’s infection was too big to get inside a human somatic cell, but... Annia put the amoeba in her monitor. She had already sequenced its genome, a double-strand helix of five amine bases—guanine, cytosine, adenine, inosine and thiourodine. She could work with that.

  She would have to shrink the cell to a fraction the size of, say, a corpuscle. There must be something in the database that would program the new carrier cell to pass through the human cell wall. The new cell could be programmed to absorb the plague virion in the bloodstream just as the amoeba had done. Sweeping the virus from inside the infected cells was a different problem. The carrier cell fed on the protein capsule of the viral body, which it wouldn't find inside the infected host cell. And while she wanted the phage to produce daughter cells to carry copies of the phage itself to infect new cells, she would have to depend on the phage itself to produce enzymes that would break up the plague genome. An ordinary domestic virus couldn't assault its wild parent, but if the DV were just a little different from the parent...

  While she thought, her fingers moved in the waldo field, sorting alleles from the primary database, looking for the codes that would modify the amoeba into a virophage. She couldn't design fast enough with one hand. She moved closer to the monitor to get both hands into the field, peripherally aware she had forced Elizabeth-Belle to one side.

  How small could they make the artificial carrier cells? They would have to be a bare fraction of the size of a corpuscle, or it would be too big to inject in quantities sufficient to sweep the host body. And what about the non-human-standard amines? Would it be able to find enough inosine and thiourodine in a human host? She'd have to program the phage to make the host cell manufacture the raw materials.

  Elizabeth-Belle said, "You can't infect sick humans with a parasite."

  "Virophage," Annia repeated with her eyes fixed on the monitor.

  "I see what it is. You can't do it."

  "Do you see another solution?" The phage would need a kill switch to tell it when to suicide. No problem for a simple DV, but the carrier cell would present more of a problem. Dissolve the carrier cell or cause it to exit the host cell, die and be carried out by the host immune system? Too much burden on an already strained system. Definitely dissolve. The constituent parts could be expelled from the host cell or repurposed by the host.

  Elizabeth-Belle must have been at a loss for a viable alternative because she folded her arms across her chest. "You'll need the Werner-Barnard algorithm to shrink the cell."

  "Tachenich 11X98 is better," Annia murmured, only half paying attention.

  "Tachenich won't reduce the size that far."

  "It will if I replace the existing size determinants with Merton 761DS587."

  "You can't do that with the non-human bases involved."

  "I'm going to substitute the Carposi variations."

  Elisabeth-Belle threw up her hands. "That will take days."

  "You're supposed to be one of the omnipotent Charmmeses. There's a spare monitor." Annia pointed at a dark projector disk at the other end of the work table. "Start the Carposi variations on Merton."

  "I'm not a lab-tech," Elizabeth-Belle complained.

  "You're not doing anything else right now."

  Tora crouched in the narrow alley between two shacks along one side of the main street where the blue-sash soldiers fought the black-uniforms with projectile weapons. The black-uniforms had started out with stun weapons when they were fighting Tora and her people who were armed mostly with clubs and knives. Now the black-uniforms had drawn their projectile guns and returned fire on the blue-sashes. The black-uniforms had shields and armor and didn't mind the projectiles very much, but the blue-sashes had to go to cover in alleys and behind the barricades. The black-uniforms would break through the barricades soon and go all through the streets, and now they were excited and expecting to be fought with guns, they would want to shoot humans. It would not be safe for the runners to lead the black-uniforms into traps the way Tora had planned.

  Projectiles hit the ground and made dust plumes in the street. They pocked holes in buildings, and humans would have been hurt if Tora had not sent all the people away from this area already. Guns thundered, and soldiers shouted until Tora could hardly hear her own lieutenants.

  A blue-sash soldier darted around the corner, looking for cover, and bumped into Tora. Sweat covered his dark face, and his eyes went wide and white as he fell back into the street where he would be exposed to fire from the black-uniforms and from his own people who were not trained properly and didn't care what they shot at. He tried to stop his fall and forgot he had a gun in his hand. He swung it toward Tora's face, and he had his finger too close to the trigger.

  Tora grabbed the gun with one hand, turned the muzzle toward the sky and pulled it away from him before his trigger finger tightened. With her other hand, she caught his wrist and pulled. The blue-sash sprawled in the dirt beside her. "Prisoner," she snapped.

  "Hey," he yelped. "We're on your side."

  "Not when you handle a gun that badly," Mr. Ventnor said.

  Tora disarmed the projectile rifle and passed it back to Dess. Dess would get rid of it so there would be one less projectile gun in the fight. Tora did not like projectile guns, and General Baldwin had made very clear orders that militia were not to use anything stronger than stun weapons. She wondered if that included tugolith dung, and she thought maybe she might laugh.

  Mr. Ventnor came close to Tora's side, pressing against her where he could be out of range of the projectiles on the street and talk into her ear so she could hear him over the sound of shouting and projectile guns. "We going to interrogate him?" he asked her. "I'd like to know what in the deep well Solante thinks he's doing."

  Tora snorted. "Cyrion parliament uses black-uniforms to control Murrayville. Not like before when Murrayville belonged to everybody. If the Solante makes black-uniforms go away, then he will control Murrayville."

  He nodded. "Once you have military rule, it doesn't much matter what military does the ruling." He swiveled and said to the prisoner, "Do your people have any kind of a strategy out there?"

  The prisoner said, "What strategy? We're going to push the sons of mudrimples out and hand them their helmets."

  Tora scowled. That sounded like a plan the Cerise would make. "Where is the Cerise?"

  "Captain Manning is at the control post."

  Now the Cerise thought she was Command. Tora thought she knew the feeling that made Maycee roll her eyes. Tora said to Mr. Ventnor, "What happens if the Cerise is not Command?"

  Mr. Ventnor turned to the prisoner. "Who's second in command after Cerise?"

  "Ivar Sunjung."

  Mr. Ventnor turned back to Tora. "Unimaginative sociopath. Follows simple commands to the letter but no flexibility."

  Tora nodded. "Like the XY118-97A lieutenant series. Kill him, or keep him?"r />
  Sometimes humans flinched when she asked questions like that, but Mr. Ventnor only shrugged. "Depends on how big a fight he gives you. Myself, I'd truss him up and store him where he can't do any harm, but sometimes you don't have the luxury of good manners."

  Tora nodded. "Where is control post?"

  Ms. Stamos had recovered from being stunned. She raised one hand. "I'll see if the runners have found it." She went out of the alley by the back where the fighting hadn't come yet. If the fighting started to come over to the next street, Tora would have to pull her soldiers back to where they would be out of the way. She did not want to do that. It would be harder then to get the black-uniforms out of Murrayville where they did not belong, but she could not engage the black-uniforms while the blue-sashes fought them with projectile weapons. She had to fall back and wait for reinforcements.

  Six blue-sashes with guns charged up the middle of the street toward the black-uniform placements, firing their weapons repeatedly until the black-uniforms returned fire. It was stupid because the black-uniforms had gone to cover behind buildings and barricades where they could fire at the blue-sashes but not be exposed themselves. The blue-sashes scattered for cover. One of them, a young man with a long, narrow face and eyes very wide with white all around the irises, ran down the street close to the houses. As he passed the mouth of the alley, Tora stood, stepped out into the street for a moment, grabbed the young man and yanked him back toward the alley just as a projectile struck him in the chest and knocked him off his balance.

  Tora dragged him further into the shelter of the shocks on either side and crouched to examine him. His eyes were still wide, but they didn't move, and they didn't blink.

  Mr. Ventnor swore and turned his head so he could not see the body. "That's Sayad Santiago, farming family. His father died three years ago, then they lost last year's white-seed crop to leaf rot. He probably signed on with Solante to make some extra credit to keep them over the slow season."