EPIDEMIC
Royal Ceriban Cruise Lines
The Klintis Region
Zoya Nolotov had the Atliekan Queen’s crew hot-racking in makeshift beds within their respective areas. It wasn’t ideal, asking crew to share the same bunk with their opposite-shift crew-mates, but it reduced the amount of space needed for sleeping.
Those on the bridge were lucky; they’d had her captain’s office to convert into shared quarters. Those in engineering and enviro were less fortunate. They’d had to make do with a storage closet and a partitioned-off corridor, respectively.
Staterooms on levels Amaryllis, Bougainvillea, Clematis, and Dahlia had been converted to convalescent care units.
Whose brilliant idea was it to name the passenger decks after flowers, anyway, Zoya thought grumpily, and not for the first time.
Thankfully, there were several on the staff and crew who had a bit of prior medical experience; these had been pulled in to assist with passenger care.
“How is the crew handling the new arrangements?” Josh asked. His image peered out at her from a holo at one of the bridge’s stations.
Zoya tossed the doctor a wry smile. “Not any happier about it than anyone else, I’m sure. But it’s a fair sight better than the alternative. At least they’re more compliant than the passengers.”
Tapping the console in front of her, she added thoughtfully, “You know, I learned a lot of things in the military. One of them was that when you work in close proximity to your fellow soldiers, you’re more likely to appreciate how dependent you are on one another for survival. Besides, they’re far less tempted to bend the rules if they know they’re under close scrutiny like this.”
The doctor grimaced. “It doesn’t much help, having the tech to isolate everyone, if the people we’re trying to save refuse to isolate.”
Zoya shrugged. “Humans are going to human. That means some will cooperate while others refuse.”
Josh nodded. “Yeah, well…. You know, all this is a bit like closing the barn door after the animals have all escaped, if they’ve already been exposed.”
“True, but we can’t risk any further exposure.”
The doctor frowned. “Yeah, about that….” He blew out a sharp breath. “My contact at the CID confirmed my suspicions. It’s a previously unknown variant of pneumatic hantavirus. But I’m beginning to think it’s more than that.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Josh rubbed the back of his neck, exhaustion written clearly on his face. “The incubation period is ridiculously short. Most viruses take a bit longer to replicate within a host.”
Zoya didn’t like the sound of that. The disease was spreading faster than the purple-banded kudzu that covered the rocky shores of her homeworld Beryl, back in Sirius. The weed could choke out a kelp farmer’s entire crop within two stellar days.
“How is this possible?”
The doctor’s lips thinned. “If this is an engineered virus.”
Zoya stared back at Josh as she turned over his words in her head. “You mean engineered as in purposely altered to do harm? Developed to unleash on an enemy?”
His lack of response was the only one she needed.
The captain’s eyes sharpened. “How many new cases?”
“Right now, we’re closing in on seven thousand confirmed, and our patient zero is dead. At the rate it’s chewing through those on board, there certainly won’t be anyone left uninfected by the time we reach port.”
HANTA IN HIDING
Medical Department, CID
Montpelier, Ceriba
Addy had just finished cataloging the missing vials from the L4 lab and sending Toland an update when her office comm unit pinged. She was surprised to see one of the virologists from the main complex on the other end.
She kept her expression carefully neutral as the man explained he had a file he wanted the admiral to see. The moment it loaded, Addy knew she was looking at something that might be one of the L4 compounds that had gone missing.
“You said this was sent to you from someone on a cruise ship?” she asked.
The virologist nodded. “Yes, it’s from the chief medical officer aboard the Atliekan Queen, one of the yachts owned by Royal Ceriba. Their patient zero is unresponsive, so we can’t contract trace him prior to boarding, but he did list a next of kin.”
Addy leapt at that. “Can you send that along as well?”
He gestured to the data he’d projected onto the holo. “It’s appended to this file. As you can see, the antigen tests they conducted show it’s a hanta. The first few patients presented a known variety, but molecular tests on subsequent patients show a completely different gene sequence. Before labeling this a novel virus, I wanted to run it past you, to see if it’s anything your team might have run across. Nothing in the CID’s database is a match.”
“Thanks, Jon, you may have the right of it. Let me send it over to the team to look at. I’ll take it from here.”
The virologist nodded with some relief, and then disconnected.
“Is that what I think it is?” Harper said from where she sat on the other side of Addy’s desk.
Although she couldn’t see him, Addy knew Snotface was curled up asleep in the analyst’s lap.
“You mean our missing fourth vial?” Addy’s hands flew through her holo interface as she pulled the data on the hantavirus the yacht’s medical team had sent, and brought it up alongside the missing L4 vial.
The data was identical.
“Yes. I’m afraid it is.”
Harper wrinkled her nose. “On a cruise ship?”
Addy spared her a quick glance. “Gather up everything we’ve found so far. I need to report this to the admiral, and we need to get back to the base.”
* * *
Micah paced TF Blue’s situation room, restless and ready for action. The missing vial had not been found on the drug lord, but Micah was certain the man they’d taken prisoner knew where it was located.
The scumbag was currently enjoying the amenities offered by the SRU’s lockup, two floors below Task Force Blue. A pair of Unit operators stood watch over him, ready to bust his balls if he so much as blinked wrong.
Micah hadn’t heard anything from Jonathan on the way back, and had been stunned to learn his twin was not at the base when they returned. On top of that, Sam was still not responding. Both of these factors fed his nervous energy.
But he’d refused Nina’s offer to join the rest of the flight crew in a card game, and was currently tossing around the idea of cruising past lockup, when Valenti strode into the room.
“SCIF in five,” she said, gaze sweeping the room. “Severance, with me.”
Micah shot Thad a questioning glance as he walked past, but the Marine just sent him a look from under raised brows that told him the man was as clueless as he was about what was going down.
Gabe was just outside the room. The agent moved aside to let Thad and the colonel pass, and then came in, trailed by both Katie Hyer and his twin.
What’s with the silent treatment? There a reason you went dark on me?
The look on Jonathan’s face had him stopping in his tracks.
“What?” he demanded, looking from Jonathan to Gabe and then to the chief warrant.
Hyer just held up her hands and then pointed to Gabe before taking a seat. The fact she’d done so without saying a single word was worrisome.
Boone and Asha must have realized the same. Boone’s feet hit the ground from where he’d had them propped up on another chair, and Asha set aside the half-formed creature she’d been whittling from a piece of wood.
Yuki and Nina looked up from their game, while Will set the deck aside and stood.
Gabe motioned them over as he came to a stop in front of Micah. His eyes swept the team before landing once more on the captain. His next words rocked Micah to his core.
“We have a situation. The Akkadians have Sam.”
* * *
The atmos
phere inside the SCIF was thick with tension, and Addy wondered if there was more going on than she knew. She and Harper were the last to arrive, and as she closed the door behind her, she felt her wire disconnect from the Unit’s server as Valenti activated the room’s security.
“This briefing needs to be fast but thorough,” Cutter informed them all. “Too many lives are depending on it—including my niece’s.”
Addy’s eyes widened. “Sam?”
“She’s been taken by Akkadia.”
“This is worse than I thought, then,” she murmured.
“I think you’d better clarify that right now, doctor.”
Addy’d never heard Duncan Cutter’s voice sound the way it did. It was as cold and hard-edged as his last name implied. She glanced across the table at Toland.
Nodding to the holo, the admiral asked, “Can you load the data for me, please, Addy?”
She nodded, and the admiral turned to face those seated around the table.
“Captain Moran and Agent Kinsley have identified the vials that were stolen. Two of them are inert material, simple protein chains from plants found on Vermilion. But the other two….” The admiral’s voice drifted off as the holoscreen flared to life.
“What you see before you is a hantavirus. It is a single-strand RNA virus that has the capacity to exchange genome segments through a process known as reassortment. This particular virus as it is presented here is pneumonic in nature,” she told them. “That means it attaches to cells in your lungs.”
She split the screen and brought up two side-by-side images.
“The image on the left is from a project one of our team was working on in L4 containment. The image on the right was sent to us from a Royal Ceriban cruise ship. They’re currently experiencing a hantavirus outbreak.” Toland paused and let her gaze sweep the table. “They’re the same.”
“What the fuck?”
“Omigod….”
“Holy shit—”
Cutter’s voice rose above them all. “How the hell did that fourth vial get on a cruise ship?” he asked, his gaze shifting from Toland to Addy.
Harper cleared her throat. “I don’t think the vial is on the ship,” she countered. “I think the person who initially stole it is on the ship.”
Valenti leaned forward. “Explain.”
“All the data we have on Jurgens, the man you brought back from Mercer, suggests he keeps his hands off the actual transactions,” Harper told them. “He has a properties manager to handle that, and she’s purported to be very no-nonsense. I can’t see her going on a cruise. It doesn’t fit the profile.”
“Then, what?” Micah asked. “The thief cracked the vial open before he handed it over to her?”
Thad shook his head and sat back, hands tucked under his armpits. “If that’s true, hoss, then it’s a case of curiosity killing the thief,” he said in a dry voice.
“And harming a lot of other innocent people in the process,” Addy added sharply.
“We think our thief is their ‘patient zero’. He’s not dead yet, but he is unresponsive,” Harper added. “He also listed someone here on Ceriba as next of kin. Hyer and I will look into it, see if we can find anything that leads us to the Akkadians who have Sam.”
Micah’s gaze cut to Harper. “I’ll help,” he said immediately.
Addy felt sympathy well within her. The man’s need to contribute in some way to Sam’s rescue was palpable.
There’s nothing harder than sitting on the sidelines when someone you care for is in danger.
Harper nodded, and Addy saw some of the tension flow from the pilot’s shoulders.
She forced her mind away from the missing physicist and onto the information she was here to deliver.
She nodded toward the holoscreen. “Here’s what you need to know. This is a novel virus. No medical treatment has yet been formulated to counteract it—none that has been released, at any rate.”
She looked to Toland for permission. The admiral nodded and ceded control of the holo to her.
Addy brought one of the images forward. “The virologists tell me this is also a trojan. It has a different virus hidden inside that can be reprogrammed.”
“Reprogrammed,” Cutter repeated, looking from Addy to Toland. “Explain.”
The admiral sent a new image to the holo, an animation that showed a 3D rendering of the enveloped virus. The camera pushed through the virus’s outer coating to the material hidden in its interior.
“Ordinarily, the inside of a virus is nothing more than RNA strands, waiting to be injected into the cytoplasm of a human cell,” Toland told them. “Don’t worry about those details; they’re not important. What is important is that, in this case, those RNA strands share space with a completely different strand.”
The admiral paused, her gaze sweeping those around the table. Her expression was grim. “That second strand is a khufuvirus, originating from the Khufu region of Alpha Centauri, where it was discovered in small, vertebrate, bat-like animals.”
Toland indicated the holo, which displayed an image of the creature. “In its current state, this khufu is not zoonotic. That means that it cannot transfer to humans.”
“Why do you say, ‘in its current state’?” Cutter asked sharply.
She let out a breath. “It’s possible that the virus hidden inside can be reassorted. Its gene segments can be shuffled and recombined to create an entirely different virus—one that is zoonotic, and has the potential to be much more deadly than the virus now infecting that yacht.”
“What kind of virus are you talking about?” Gabe’s voice fell into the silence following Toland’s proclamation.
“A hemorrhagic virus,” Addy told him.
“You mean like the Sargon Fever outbreak in Alpha Centauri in the late twenty-three hundreds that was so deadly?” Cutter asked.
Addy nodded. “Exactly like that.”
After a moment, Thad asked the question the captain had been expecting—and dreading.
“How would the reprogramming instructions be sent?”
Addy’s lips thinned. “Theoretically by altering the virus’s quantum entangled, chirally paired twin. In this case, that would be the khufuvirus inside the third vial. The one the Akkadians have.”
“Let me get this straight,” Cutter said slowly. “The people on that yacht have been exposed to the virus from vial number four. And the Akkadians have vial number three, which contains the virus’s mirror twin. And you’re saying that the Akkadians could do something to the virus they have, and it would impact the people on that yacht?”
Toland nodded. “Theoretically, yes.”
“You keep saying that word,” Micah muttered.
“Wait. Hold on here,” Jonathan jackknifed up in his seat, his back ramrod straight. He looked from Addy to the admiral, his brow creasing in alarm. “Two things. First, you’re saying this is possible because the vials are entangled, right?”
“It’s possible, yes,” Toland said.
“Second, whatever happens to one pair partner, happens to the other, right?” he asked.
Toland nodded again.
“That’s clearly not true.” Micah jumped into the discussion. “If that were the case, every time Jonathan’s injured, his wounds would appear on me, and they don’t.”
Toland shook her head. “To be frank, we don’t know precisely why it’s happening to these smaller organisms but not to you. The machine that created you and the other chiral pairs was destroyed when deGrasse went up, along with most of Dr. Stinton’s research. We had to begin from the ground up, so to speak, and reverse engineer a lot of it.”
Addy smiled to take a bit of the clinical edge off Toland’s answer. “I think another important aspect to keep in mind is that it was never that man’s intent to entangle you. It was Sam who discovered that your lives were intertwined; Stinton never knew.”
She inclined her head toward Toland, and added gently, “One of Project Rufus’s primary goals is to underst
and, and then try to duplicate, the entanglement that you share. There are no rule books here; I’m sure the method we’ve worked out is much different than what Stinton put you through.”
Micah sat back, his gaze turning inward as he processed what they’d just learned.
“Micah’s right, you’ve repeatedly said this is all theoretical. Why, Admiral?” Gabe asked.
“Because we’ve been proceeding very cautiously, and gathering copious amounts of data every step of the way. We’re only now reaching the point where we’re ready to test Doctor Travis’s theory of quantum entanglement.”
“And Akkadia has Sam,” Micah bit out.
“How will we know if they’ve figured this out?” Gabe asked.
“You mean how will we know if they tortured her, and now know the vials are entangled?” Micah interrupted.
Valenti held up a restraining hand. “How will we know, doctor?” she repeated the question.
Addy met Valenti’s steady stare. “We’ll know when those people on that yacht begin to show signs of severe, multisystem failure as a result of hemorrhagic fever.”
“But what about the inner vial, wouldn’t we be able to deliver the antigen to them before they have a chance to alter the khufuvirus?” Harper said.
“What’s this about an inner vial?” Cutter asked sharply.
Addy shifted her gaze to meet the director’s eyes. “Sam made sure she included the antigen along with every vial that contained a virus,” Addy said in a soft voice. “It was encapsulated in a smaller vial, nested inside the original.”
Thad frowned. “But if that’s the case, why is everyone on board that yacht still sick?”
“My guess?” Addy’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “Our thief must have managed to crack the seal, but he didn’t do much more than look inside before he closed it up again.”
Harper shuddered, and her eyes looked haunted. “If what I went through is any indication, then yeah, my vote is that’s exactly how it went down.”
The Chiral Protocol – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: Biogenesis War Book 2 (The Biogenesis War) Page 18