Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  "That's Carposi," Elizabeth-Belle grumbled.

  "You don't have to put thiourodine in every codon. Substitute guanine."

  "You don't know what that will do."

  "It will stabilize the cell membrane," Annia insisted.

  Elizabeth-Belle clenched her jaw. "You already have the plague yourself. How much time can you afford to waste?"

  Annia had hoped Elizabeth-Belle wouldn't notice the spreading rash or Annia's flushed face and glassy eyes. "We can't afford to miss anything. You're a better technician than I am, so I'll revise Merton while you translate Huberwald. And don't use so much thiourodine. It has to meld with human biology."

  Merton proved to be relatively easy to modify, substituting guanine for some of the thiourodine amines, and Annia started a run of the revised Merton size-determinants before Elizabeth-Belle had the Huberwald sequence ready.

  This time, the carrier cell was stable. The carrier cell absorbed and dissolved the plague capsid, and the plague couldn't replicate in the semi-alien environment of the modified catpil amoeba. The carrier bonded successfully to the host cell membrane and injected its DV payload into the plague-infected host cells. Then the phage manufactured the enzymes that snipped the plague genome into its constituent amines. Then the phage used the plague amines and the host cell’s materials to manufacture new carrier cells. The new carriers then transported the replicated virophage back out into the bloodstream.

  When Annia saw the results from the first ten bio-tubes, she stood up in excitement and had to grab the edge of the table to steady herself against the spin in her head. "It works."

  Elizabeth-Belle pulled the results from Annia's monitor to her own. "It doesn't. You were right about Huberwald. Antius is self-destructing too soon. Probably couldn't tolerate Carposi."

  Annia looked again, and Elizabeth-Belle was right. More than a third of the phage DNA had self-destructed already—well before sweeping the host clear of the plague infection, but even so, it had reduced the viral load in the host. The plague would rebound, but that would take time.

  "If we could produce enough of this variation, we could give the sickest patients more time while we solve the problem of the suicide trigger."

  Elizabeth-Belle rolled her chair back from the table and swung toward Annia. "So you put the compiler onto manufacturing your phage in enough volume to treat a few patients. Even at full capacity, it won't produce enough to treat more than a hundred people per run. In the meantime, what are we supposed to use to run the Huberwald variation? Or the version after that? You'll waste so much time compiling a partial treatment, you'll lose just as many patients as if you'd concentrated on a full cure in the first place."

  "If we doubled the dose—or tripled..."

  "It would kill the patient. There's a reason the self-destruct has so many controls on it."

  Annia sagged into her chair. "We should run a live test on the tribbles anyway. We'll still have enough capacity on the compiler to run Huberwald."

  Elizabeth-Belle swung her chair back to her monitor without comment and restored the Huberwald genes she was converting to match the genetics of the carrier cell. Annia sent the partially effective virophage to the compiler. She could at least run a handful of tribble-sized doses. There was always a chance the phage would behave differently in a live host.

  The lab compiler had seemed enormous to Annia when she first saw it. Now it seemed pitifully small and slow. Fine for a tiny backwater hospital barely worthy of the name, but Cyrion must have at least one, maybe even two of the industrial DV factories that could produce, in a few days, enough virophage to treat the entire infected population of the planet.

  Her headache returned with a throbbing behind her hot, dry eyes. To cool herself, she opened the collar of her coat, exposing the med-patches pasted in a half-circle under her collar bone. Elizabeth-Belle already knew Annia had contracted the plague. No point now in trying to hide it.

  While Elizabeth-Belle continued to work on the Hoag revisions to Huberwald, Annia tried to analyze the failure of Antius. Even with Carposi, the inosine and thiorodine amines destabilized Antius, and triggered the self-destruct too soon. She scanned for a way to correct the deficiency, but although Antius was the most stable and reliable of the self-destruct mechanisms, it just couldn't take the volume of thiordine they had to use in the conversion.

  Annia tried to dig the headache out of her temples with her thumbs and wished for something cool to put over her eyes. Could she stand another round of stimulants? She had already gone over the safe dose on the analgesics.

  "There," Elizabeth-Belle said. She pulled the phage genome from Annia's monitor and inserted Huberwald in the space reserved for it. Then she flicked the result to the compiler. "Do you have any other sterling ideas you want me to implement?"

  Annia shook her head. "I can't think. Huberwald and Hoag should work."

  "Should," Elizabeth-Belle repeated, disgusted.

  Annia's head was all but slipping off her hands when the compiler announced its completion of the first inoculation batch of the partial treatment. She pulled herself up, caught her balance and crossed the swaying floor to the big machine. She slotted a capsule into the hypodermic. She had enough for all twelve of the tribbles.

  She faced the rack of cages, fixed her eyes on a woolly brown animal and crossed the unsteady floor faster than she meant to go because she kept thinking she was falling forward. She caught herself on the brown tribble's cage and rested her hip on the supporting shelf. She had enough for all twelve. Or one human. Too soon for human testing. She blinked her eyes clear. She had to go through the right protocols. Bio-simulation first, then live tests on tribbles. Human testing only if the tribbles showed no contra-indications.

  What about the people in the hospital outside the lab? There were babies on the edge of death out there. She had enough virophage for three infants. That would be a valid live test even if it weren't standard protocol. Annia worked her way toward the door, going from one table or chair or work station to the next, giving herself a moment to catch her balance. She leaned her shoulder against the wall next to the door and palmed the sensor. The door opened. One of the guards outside the door turned to look at her. He started to speak, saw her face, and recoiled, edging as far away from her as he could without appearing to leave his post.

  Annia scratched the rash under her chin.

  Plague victims occupied every meter of the floor, families huddled together, elderly people on blankets, babies in arms, older children draped over laps or cuddled under parental arms, or holding their sick parents upright.

  Almost at her feet, a woman in red trousers and a blood-stained tunic swayed from foot to foot, holding a limp two or three-year-old child. Further away, a red-faced bundle lay over its father's shoulder, coughing out blood and vomit. To Annia's right, a round-faced girl slumped on the floor, a six-month-old lying in the hollow of her crossed legs. The girl couldn't have been more than seventeen. One of the procreationists had been desperate enough to defy Mr. Ambrose and come to the hospital for help.

  Those three. Annia could give them a few more hours, and it would still be a valid test.

  Then someone said, "Let me go."

  Annia turned toward the sound: family on her left, a father and two children, and an old woman—grandmother of the children by her coloring and her features. She had the rash, and she must have been sitting on the floor because she now pulled herself up on her son's arm, ignoring his effort to make her sit down and rest. "Take me outside, Donick. I'm not going to take up space that's needed for Jennick and Donner."

  Her son protested and tried to hold her. The older grandchild clung to his grandmother's trousers—bloodstained in the back, Annia noted—and tried to restrain her, but something in the woman overpowered the enervating effects of the virus. She pulled away and took a few steps toward the outer doors.

  As she did, she passed an old man and his adult daughter, both patterned with the rash. The old man looked d
own at the young woman. He disengaged his arm from hers, and took the arm of the old woman. She looked up, startled, and he nodded as if they belonged to a secret society of two. The man's daughter didn't have the strength to protest. She looked after him with puzzled, glassy eyes.

  The man whose old mother was staggering away on the arm of a stranger, pulled the young woman to him, and they propped each other up, pulled between guilt and grief as their parents departed.

  An old man alone climbed painfully to his feet in time to join the departing pair. At a short distance, a woman tenderly helped her mother to stand. The old woman took her daughter's face in her hands and kissed her forehead. She joined a third man on the slow march toward the door while the daughter covered her face and cried. Slowly, a stream of people grew and flowed not into but out of the hospital. Not all the elderly, or even most, just a trickle of men and women unwilling to take space or medicine from their children. Some of the sick didn't notice the exodus. Others held on, stubbornly hoping for a cure to reach them.

  Annia looked down at the hypodermic in her shaking hand. Twelve doses, or three doses, or one. She pressed the muzzle to the inside of her elbow over the sleeve of her coat. Twelve, or three, or one. She pulled the trigger. The phage in the cartridge seethed in its golden suspension and drained into Annia's arm. She wished she could have cried. Tears would have soothed and cooled her eyes.

  The room kept going fuzzy. Annia tried to fix her gaze on the workstation alongside Elizabeth-Belle, but she couldn't see that far, and though she could make out isolated objects around her, she couldn't link them together to find a route back to her station. She stepped away from the wall, balanced, and staggered toward a table in more or less the direction she thought she wanted to go. She never arrived.

  Annia blinked awake and stared up at the underside of a table. Honeybear rippled up her torso and writhed its proboscis over her face. She raised her head. Someone had put a pillow under her head and a thermal sheet over her but hadn't bothered trying to move her from the floor.

  She felt her forehead. The headache had retreated to a dull tension at the nape of her neck. Her fever had dropped slightly, and she thought she could keep down another food concentrate. She wanted to stay and sleep for another week, but whether her present relief had been brought about by her nap or by the virophage sweeping the century plague from her body, she didn't have a week. Another day maybe. Two at best if the partial cure worked as well in a live host as in a bio-sim vial.

  Annia pulled herself out of the makeshift sleep cabinet under the table and used the tabletop to get her feet under her.

  "You slept for two hours," Elizabeth-Belle said without looking up from her monitor where she appeared to be studying the Charmmes variation of the original plague.

  Annia teetered to the cabinet beside the tribble cages and found a bottle of food concentrate bland enough to settle her queasy stomach. She debated the stimulant patches, but decided to leave them off for the moment. She scratched the rash under her chin and found it less bumpy and tender to the touch. She took a tissue sample and put it in her old model sequencer. If only the partial treatment would perform better in a live host. It sometimes happened. Rarely. Almost never. But it could.

  Feeling stronger, she got to her monitor and slumped into her seat. "What happened with Huberwald. Did it work?"

  Elizabeth-Belle shrugged. "It died as soon as it entered the host cell."

  Annia's slumped as if gravity had doubled in her immediate vicinity. "What went wrong?"

  Elizabeth-Belle continued to study the genome in her monitor. "It's in the sequencer."

  Annia folded her arms on the table and rested her forehead on the back of her wrist. She so needed to sleep, but almost as soon as she got her head down, the sequencer sent the results of the Huberwald variation to her monitor. Annia sat up and scanned the data cloud. Her head felt almost clear, and the cause of the failure leaped out at her at once. "I know what's wrong." The certainty went through her like ice water, shocking her upright. "It's Hoag. Reverse adenosine and thiouridine at the three and remove the sulfur at number seven, converting the amine to uracil." She flicked the relevant section of the phage genome to Elizabeth-Belle.

  The other woman studied the data cloud. "I suppose you want me to do this for you as well."

  "Just check my conclusion. Will it work?"

  Elizabeth-Belle raised one eyebrow. "There's only one way to know."

  The minute adjustment took Annia a few minutes to change, then to scan for potential conflicts. When she was sure she had a working model, she sent it to the compiler for another run. While she waited for compilation and incubation, she felt well enough to scan through the massive database of domestic virus alleles, looking for anything she might have missed, anything that might produce a more effective cluster of cutting enzymes to break up the plague genome in the host cells.

  Finally, the compiler announced the completion of the latest incubation and sent the vials to the sequencer for analysis. Annia watched the data accumulate as it came from the sequencer. Her heart began to hammer, making her light-headed. The first samples were virus-free, the phage DNA had collapsed, and the last carrier cells were dissolving within the host cells to be recycled.

  She stopped the cry of triumph in her throat. Seven years ago, she had uncovered the plague and lost her life. She couldn't pretend Solante wasn't watching her, and he had no intention of turning the cure over to Planetary Health much less the rest of the known galaxy. She made herself slump in her chair. "It's no good. The kill sequence isn't holding up; we're going to have to start over with Abelard."

  Elizabeth-Belle forgot the Charmmes variation rotating in her monitor and whirled on Annia. "Abelard? What in the nine states of matter are you talking about? Abelard?"

  "Look for yourself." Annia sent the data cloud from her monitor to Elizabeth-Belle's.

  The other woman glared at the phage genome and the results from the sequencing of the latest variation. She started to snap something at Annia. Then she stopped. She peered closer, then she looked sideways at Annia.

  Annia shrugged.

  Elizabeth-Belle rocked back and threw up her hands. "Fine. Fine. It doesn't work. We'll try Abelard. What do you want for the conversion? Hoag again?"

  "Chesterbridge," Annia answered.

  Elizabeth-Belle tightened her lips. "Chesterbridge."

  Chesterbridge was a joke among geneticists. An attempt to use xanthine and diaminopurine to modify the kill trigger in the Lomax sequence. "Exactly."

  Elizabeth-Belle glowered at her. The woman was really throwing herself into the charade. Or she actually blamed Annia for the whole situation as if Annia should have found some other way to get the equipment she needed besides dealing with Solante.

  Annia shrugged.

  The other woman clenched her jaw and glared, then she turned to her monitor and swept the Charmmes variation aside and pulled up the Abelard kill sequence.

  Annia set the compiler to produce the Huberwald variation at full capacity. She could hope Solante wasn't monitoring her lab equipment. If so, the switch from testing and incubation to full production would instantly alert him she had a cure at hand. Annia tried to concentrate on pulling her phage apart and determining where she would put the Abelard kill sequence, but it was a ridiculous exercise. Abelard, while it had some uses, was completely incompatible with Annia's creation. Still, she had to appear to be working on something while she waited for the compiler to produce the first doses.

  The pretense also covered her systematic transfer of her genome to a data crystal mounted in the clamp of her processor. She used a modification of the algorithm she had used to hide her original plague data in the Federation central database. This time, instead of hiding the data itself, she needed to conceal its transfer from the processor to the storage crystal. While Annia shuffled through files of genomes, bits and pieces of her virophage found their way to hard storage.

  She checked the process of the
compiler, but it hadn't yet produced a full dose. Should she wait for at least one full adult dose? When would Solante come for her? How long did she have? But if she could wait for a full dose, she could afford to withdraw enough of the phage inoculent for the tribbles and wait a little longer for another full dose.

  Annia slotted the hypodermic into the delivery port and felt the click. She withdrew the hypo and went to the tribble cages. She lifted the woolly brown animal out. It lay listless in her palm, blinking eyes sticky with mucus, too tired to greet her with its monotonous warble. She tried to shield her actions from the rest of the room with her body. If there were holo'corders in the lab, there was no point in alerting watchers that she was live-testing after she had just told Elizabeth-Belle that the Huberwald variant had failed.

  She put the tribble back in its cage. It retracted its leg stubs and ignored the fruit pellet she offered. Annia tossed it instead to Honeybear. The catpil reared up and snapped the pellet out of the air, then rippled nearer to Annia and stood up to beg.

  Annia injected another tribble, this one too weak to open its eyes. She didn't offer it a pellet but held a pellet up where Honeybear could see it and stretch its proboscis. Annia set the pellet on the shelf beside her and reached for a third tribble.

  Honeybear stretched for the fruit pellet but couldn't reach the top of the shelf. It contracted its hydraulic sacks for a moment, thinking with the string of neural nodes that served it for a brain, then it reared up on its hindmost segments, hooked its toes in the skirt of Annia's coat and began to climb. Annia put the third tribble back in its cage and took a moment to scoop Honeybear onto the shelf where it snapped up the pellet and clicked appreciatively. With one hand, Annia reached for another tribble and, concealing her movements from the room at large, she pressed the hypodermic to Honeybear's side where the hydraulic sack lay closest to the skin and pulled the trigger.

  The catpil clicked and turned its forequarters to run its trunk over the hypodermic. Annia took down a sleek-furred white tribble that chirred and warbled at her touch. She injected it, and the tribble took a pellet. Honeybear's circulatory system had been gradually replacing the embalming gel in its healing fluid sacks with its own hydraulic fluid. Annia estimated the phage's carrier cells would survive in the catpil's body. The cells were modified enough from the amoeba Annia had used as a model that they couldn't eat the catpil tissue, and Honeybear had enough of the virus in its system to keep the phage fed for a while.