{I’ll push the file to you here in a second,} Addy replied. {Need anything else?}
{Not now, thanks.}
Harper severed the link, and a few seconds later, a notification popped up on her overlay. She found a file waiting for her, filled with G-C-A-T tags and helical structures.
She grabbed the data, feeding it into the NSA’s decryption algorithm.
“Here,” she told Katie, sending her the DNA crack. “Try this.”
The chief warrant caught it and flipped it onto the holoscreen.
“Nope,” she said after a few seconds had passed without any activity. “Got any other ideas?”
Harper’s gaze landed on a holoframe, sitting dark on the corner of the programmer’s desk. She reached over and toggled it on. An album appeared, filled with images of two people—Leah and a young man with similar features.
Harper sat back, studying the image.
“Brother, maybe?” Katie suggested.
Harper shrugged. “Feels right. Let me check her personnel file.”
There, listed as next of kin, was one Charles Harris. He was a student at the U of Ceriba, St. Clair, studying machine learning, much like his sister had.
Leah’s younger brother had also gone missing six weeks earlier.
“That right there could be motive,” Katie remarked. “And maybe the DNA we need isn’t hers, but her brother’s.”
Nodding her agreement, Harper’s eyes swept the small office once more, something about it pulling at her memory. Her eyes landed on the U of Ceriba jacket that hung from a peg on the wall by the office door.
“That jacket looks a bit big for a stick of a girl who’s about fifty-five kilos, wouldn’t you say?” she murmured.
Katie angled a look her way. “You think it’s her brother’s?”
“I think if I had a brother who’d gone missing under shady circumstances, I’d find comfort in having something of his nearby.”
She reached for her bag, extracting a site survey microdrone and sample case, glad she’d thought to bring one along. It didn’t take the small airborne machine long to identify three different traces of DNA on the jacket. Two of them were female, but the third was male.
She pulled the sample and uploaded the data to the Center’s medical department, with a request that the sample be sequenced.
“That’ll take an hour or two,” she said, standing. “Let’s go grab some lunch.”
An hour later, they were back with fresh eyes and ready to tackle the rest of the drive. A few hours into the afternoon, a notification appeared across Harper’s datalink.
“Got the DNA sequence back,” she told Katie, opening a new window and importing the file that medical had sent.
She pushed it through the decryption algorithm and then applied the results to the scrambled sections of the SI’s base code.
“Bingo,” she said as the alphanumeric strings began reordering themselves into coherent sentences.
Both women read along as the code unpacked. The commented-out sections were a confession of sorts. Leah documented everything she’d done, and included a list of each of the stolen vials, by serial number.
“Holy—” Harper whispered. “She hacked Dave and then used the SI to steal the vials?”
“Looks like,” Katie said.
As she scanned the information Leah had left, Harper realized the woman had done what she could to minimize the damage.
“Look,” she said, highlighting a section. “She says they ordered her to steal L4 vials, but she sent L2 vials instead.”
Katie looked up. ‘Think that’s what got her killed?”
Harper shook her head. “I don’t think so. My credits are on them wanting to tie up loose ends.” She leaned forward.Look. She sent Dave in to grab some empty L4 vials, and then ordered him to fill them with L2 material.”
Katie looked at her. “Yes, but that doesn’t explain why the L2 material’s not showing as missing.”
The chief warrant sat back and stared up to the ceiling, running blunt-tipped fingers through her short, blue hair as she thought through the possibilities.
“You think maybe she was skimming off the top, so to speak, to keep the theft hidden?” she asked slowly. “Maybe we’ll find vials that have less volume than the rest.”
Harper’s brow furrowed. “The only way we’re going to know for sure is to go into that lab and see for ourselves.”
Katie jackknifed up. “Uhm, that’s a hard no.”
Harper smiled. “You weren’t here for Addy’s talk. No worries. L2’s not the hazardous stuff. I’ll do it.”
The other woman shot her a doubtful look before she returned her attention to the folder with the SI’s base code. She highlighted a companion file, one that recorded Dave’s activities on that date. “Maybe you won’t have to. This’ll tell us what he did.”
The SI’s data record proved Katie’s theory right; Leah had indeed ordered Dave to siphon material from some of the L2 vials. But then the record began showing error logs.
“Oh, damn,” Harper said.
Katie reached for the command right before the error, and then scrubbed forward to the one immediately following it.
“This goes way beyond ‘oh damn’,” the chief said. “He glitched in the middle of the swap.”
“Looks like she saw it and sent the command again.”
Katie shot her a grim look. “Yeah, but look at exactly where in the process he froze. We’re missing a good thirty seconds here. There’s no record in his logs of Dave executing the command to acquire empty L4 vials. We have no proof, no way of knowing what he took.”
Harper drew in a breath. “We do if I go down there.”
Katie began to protest, and Harper waved her off.
“Look, I know we’ve already copied the ghost drive, but I’d feel better if you stayed here and kept this console active. I’ll go check these serial numbers out in person, and you can cross-check me, okay? I think that’s the only way to know for certain which vials are missing.”
CONTAGION
Royal Ceriba Yacht Atliekan Queen
Atliekas Nebula Park
Zoya Nolotov, the yacht’s captain, looked up from her holodisplay as a chime sounded, indicating someone was at her office door.
“Come in,” she called out.
Josh, the yacht’s chief medical officer, stepped inside.
She indicated a chair. “What’s up, doc?”
Serious eyes pegged hers. “We have a problem.”
Nolotov was retired Navy. She’d spent decades captaining some of the Alliance’s finest ships. Along with that came the responsibility of leadership, and she’d long ago mastered the ability to read her subordinates. She leaned back in her chair and studied him, noting his set jaw.
It was unusual for the doctor to seek her out during the first few days of a launch, beyond the usual staff briefings. Usually, he was too busy with his staff, reviewing special passenger requirements for the seven-day voyage.
When he did drop by to see her, their relationship was more casual than the ones Zoya’d had while in the Navy. There, procedures were regimented. It had taken her a good year to get used to the fact that in the private sector, there could be three different ways to accomplish the same thing. That had resulted in a few disagreements between her and Josh.
Intellectually, she knew the cruise line catered to the affluent, and that they expected a certain standard of care. It was another thing altogether to learn that occasionally, passengers would use the trip to receive elective or cosmetic surgical procedures.
She wondered if this was another problem along those lines, and reminded herself this wasn’t a Navy ship.
“A problem?” Zoya repeated. “What kind of a problem?”
“One of our housekeeping staff has shown up in medical with respiratory symptoms,” Josh said. “Her illness is resistant to standard treatment.”
She thought about that for a moment. “The fact you’re here talking to me su
ggests this goes beyond telling her to take the day off.”
Josh nodded. “I might be borrowing trouble, but would rather err on the side of caution. It’s possible she has a new virus. They mutate all the time, especially the RNA ones. If that’s the case, she can’t interact with anyone until she’s no longer shedding the virus, so she’s in isolation right now.”
“Do we need to be concerned about people she may have infected?”
The doctor’s worried eyes met hers. “That’s really the reason I’m here. A family came in just an hour ago. Their six-year-old daughter is having difficulty breathing, same as my first patient. The kid’s worsening, and nothing I have is helping. Whatever they have is pneumonic.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Pneumonic?”
“Means it involves the respiratory system. The virus attaches to cells in the lungs.”
Zoya sat back and thought a moment. “I’m sure you’ve run a contact trace on everyone she ran into,” she began, but broke off when he shook his head.
“Our sick staff member’s not our patient zero. I already ran their ID tokens, and the little girl never came anywhere near her.”
Alarmed, the captain stood. “How do we keep this from spreading, then?”
“That’s going to be a bit more difficult. Both the maid and the little girl have interacted with thousands already. And then there’s patient zero.”
“Have you questioned your patients about where they’ve been recently? Did they recall running into anyone onboard who might be ill?”
“I have.” The doctor looked down at his hands. “They both gave a description—it matches. The passenger our worker ran into asked for directions to medical, but he never showed up.”
That concerned Zoya. “Does she recall where she saw this passenger?”
The doctor nodded. “Gardenia Deck, around stateroom G-47, she thinks. Her mind’s a little fuzzy at the moment.”
Zoya stared thoughtfully into the distance as she considered whether to initiate quarantine protocol.
“I don’t want to overreact,” she said slowly, “but do you think this warrants a shutdown?”
“I think it warrants contacting headquarters, and letting them know that we have a problem,” Josh replied. “I have one of the nurses running a blood panel on both patients. Currently, they’re being given fluids and are resting comfortably.”
“Okay. I’ll defer entirely to you on this, of course,” she told him. “Whatever you recommend.”
* * *
Two hours later, Zoya received a ping from the doctor.
{I think we found patient zero.} There was a pause and then he continued. {I’ve taken the liberty to contact someone I know at the CID on Ceriba.}
The captain felt a shaft of surprise. {Isn’t that a bit…drastic?}
{I can assure you, it’s not. He’s unresponsive, and in severe respiratory distress.}
She saw him initiate a request for a visual connection. She accepted it, throwing the connection up on her office’s holoscreen.
His worried gaze stared back at her.
“How serious is it?”
“Serious enough,” he said, ticking off the list with his fingers. “It’s respiratory. It’s fast-acting. And it’s stealthy. It’s able to remain hidden from my patients’ immune systems while it replicates inside, until it swamps their defenses.”
“Hidden?” Zoya repeated.
Josh nodded. “Some viruses are quite clever. They can mimic human RNA, fooling the body’s security system into thinking it belongs.”
“You talk about them as if they’re alive, like some kind of enemy combatant.”
Josh cocked his head. “In a way, they are. Well, they’re not alive, like parasites or fungi or bacteria. But they’re not technically dead, either. They’re sort of like zombies.”
She shook her head. “Now, there’s an interesting mental picture.”
Josh dipped his head in agreement. “A virus is like a really cunning thief; it’ll attach itself to a certain cell type within the body and hack its way inside. Once there, it hijacks the cell, using the material inside to replicate itself.”
“That sounds almost like guerilla warfare,” Zoya said, thinking back to some of the more covert missions she’d flown with the Navy.
Josh nodded. “That’s actually a good analogy. But this particular terrorist also has the ability to mutate or reassort its genetic material into new combinations.” He looked pensive, as if he was reaching mentally for an analogy. “Kind of like if your terrorist came in with a flechette pistol but could change it to a CUSP or a frag grenade at will.”
The captain blinked. As analogies went, the one Josh presented was damn scary.
“They’re medicine’s outliers. That’s why viruses may be the one thing we never cure.” Josh shook his head. “At any rate, I’ve sent everything we have on the patients to my contact at the CID. They should be getting back to me very soon. Until then, I really do think we need to initiate quarantine procedures.”
Zoya pinched the bridge of her nose, a sudden headache starting behind her eyes. She nodded. “I’ll make an announcement. Do you know how many people have been potentially exposed?”
A pained look crossed the doctor’s face. “We ran a contact trace on everyone who’s been within two meters of him, our maid, and the young girl’s family.”
“And?”
“And we’re looking at upwards of five thousand people,” he said.
“Stars gone nova,” she muttered. “That’s more than half of those on board this ship.”
MISLABELED
Level Two Containment, CID
Montpelier, Ceriba
Harper left Katie behind in Leah’s office while she ran up to the L2 lab to do an in-person visual check of the vials. True to form, the chief warrant kept a running commentary the entire way.
{You think maybe we should have waited to do this until Alvarez and the doctor came back online?}
Katie didn’t sound nervous; Harper wasn’t sure the chief warrant even knew how to do nervous. But she was questioning the wisdom of their actions. Harper could appreciate that, but she also knew the Akkadians weren’t going to wait for them to catch up.
{All we’re going to do is check the serial numbers on a few vials so we can identify what’s missing. What can go wrong?}
Katie groaned as Harper entered the lift. {Now you’ve gone and jinxed us, Kinsley. Don’t you know nothing about ops?}
Harper laughed. {Hey, I’m an analyst, not an agent, remember? I don’t go on ops. For a badass Navy pilot, you sure are superstitious.}
The lift doors opened, depositing her onto the floor where the L2 labs were located. As she passed by Addy’s office, she peeked in the open door. Neither the doctor nor Gabe were inside.
{Huh,} she said.
{Huh, what?} Katie asked.
{Oops, sorry. Didn’t realize I’d sent that. Looks like Addy and Gabe are still in medical with the body,} Harper said.
When the chief responded, her voice sounded thoughtful. {Feels wrong to call her ‘the body’ now that we’ve gotten to know her a bit, doesn’t it?}
{Yeah…. }
She came to a stop in front of the L2 containment doors, passed the security program her Mil-Int credentials, and stepped inside.
{Well, it’s just like Addy described. Two labs, and a room for our favorite pair of troublemakers.}
The labs were dark, but the ferrets’ room was lit. She crossed over to it, curious to see how the captain had set up their home.
{Okay, now I’m jealous,} Hyer said. {I kinda miss those little guys. They sure made the trip back to Ceriba interesting.}
Harper grinned at the memory. {Try spending a few weeks sneaking through Luyten’s Star with those two. Interesting’s a mild way of putting it.}
As she stopped in front of the door, she saw a digital placard announcing the room’s occupants as ‘chiral laboratory animals’. She frowned at the implications those words held, but as
she looked through the windows, she had to admit the ferrets’ setup looked pretty swank.
The clearsteel panes stretched from floor to ceiling, giving her an unobstructed view of the various layers and textures that filled the smaller room. Her eyes drifted across platforms and ladders, plush nests and tall cat trees. In one corner, she could just make out a small, wet nose, peeking out of a darkened, felted cave. Its whiskers and paws were twitching as it dreamed.
Harper craned her neck, searching for the ferret’s mirror twin, and was disappointed she didn’t see him.
She stepped away from the window and went over to the lab’s entrance. This door, too, required her credentials to access, as it was no simple entrance. The two-stage airlock system had a sensor suite that would sweep for contaminants on her way back out.
She passed through a light decon mist and then felt a pressure differential as the second set of doors opened. Harper paused on the threshold before entering the lab proper and uncapped a small cylinder, releasing a swarm of crime scene microdrones. She ordered them to sweep the area for material that would identify those who had most recently been inside.
To her mind, the sweep was more procedural than anything. Harper was convinced Leah had told the truth, and the vial’s thief was, indeed, the Center’s SI. That meant the drones should find nothing out of place.
Unfortunately, Harper had no proof to back up her theory, since Leah had erased the feeds that monitored the secured labs—all of them, L2 through L4—on the day in question.
An alert flashed as the swarm pushed a ‘completed’ message to her overlay.
{Drone sweep complete,} she told Katie, recalling the units to their cache. {Pushing telemetry your way now.}
{Got it,} the other woman confirmed after a moment. {Cross referencing against the list of technicians cleared to enter the lab.}
Harper took in a deep breath. {That’s it, then. I’m stepping inside.}
Her gaze panned across the neat and sparsely furnished area. The room was pristine, not a thing out of place. Broad lab benches lined the walls, with a few long tables running down its center. Tidy rows of lab equipment were pushed against the wall or tucked into alcoves. The large preservation unit that contained the chiral specimens sat in one corner.
The Chiral Protocol – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: Biogenesis War Book 2 (The Biogenesis War) Page 13