Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1)

by K. McLaughlin

  The team working on the initial viral outbreak had been thorough. They’d done all the right tests, and compared the virus to the database. Initial results had shown it was a new virus, one they’d never seen before. But they’d kept digging. Then they had the idea to test the meteorite samples the Antarctica team brought back with them. And they found their virus, deep in the core of one of the samples.

  Which of course made no sense at all. Ice might harbor a viral sample, but it was unlikely to survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The little fragments of rock and metal that the team had been collecting weren’t likely to have a viral sample embedded in them. It wasn’t impossible – but it was highly improbable.

  But not this rock.

  Carmen studied the diagram. Once they discovered which rock housed the virus, it had been carefully examined. The meteorite had a hollow core, which was filled with ice. Again, not impossible – but preposterously improbable. The ice held the virus. But it wasn’t just one virus. The little bit of water ice in the middle of the rock was teeming with thousands of viruses. Most of them did absolutely nothing to humans. They didn’t have the right proteins to connect to human cells – or the cells of any other Earth creatures, Carmen was betting.

  But as she flipped through the data, something became immediately obvious.

  “None of the viruses contained in the meteor were related, even a little bit”?

  Her father shook his head. “No. Each one was unique.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Evolution would indicate that there would at least be some similarities between some of the viruses.”

  “True,” Doctor Rosa replied.

  “If they evolved,” Carmen said.

  “Also true,” her father said, his face a grim mask. “Now you see why this document is classified, and why you have never seen it, and I did not just show it to you.”

  There was no way you could have thousands of completely unique viruses in a random sampling. Some of them would be related, would have shown similar structures. It was impossible. Which meant the only answer was that the viruses in the meteor had not evolved.

  They’d been manufactured. And put inside the rock.

  “We’re sure the rock wasn’t made by some nut on Earth?” she asked.

  “Geology report makes it very clear that the material is extra-terrestrial in origin.”

  Her head whirled. This changed everything. Moving the research to the moon made a lot more sense, all of a sudden. Among the things they’d brought with them was that original rock, complete with its massive pile of engineered viruses. Who knew how many of the others were dangerous, too? Better to put the research someplace where quarantine could be absolutely assured, if anything went wrong.

  The meteor itself was like a cosmic biological weapon. Someone had made all those viruses with as broad a range of possible protein shells as possible. Whatever had manufactured them didn’t know what the target species looked like, so they couldn’t tailor a specific virus. But they created a huge range with the idea that one of them would probably work. At least one of them had, and now people were dying.

  And the virus wasn’t the biggest threat. The biggest threat was whoever had made it.

  “That’s why our work here is so crucial,” her father said softly. “Because the worst is still coming.”

  The next morning, all the rats they’d injected with the vaccine were sick. The vaccine hadn’t helped the animals to build immunity. It had actually given them the virus. It was a crushing failure, and Carmen couldn’t help but feel desperate. Her grim mood was shared by the rest of the team as well. Most of them had family and friends on Earth, and anyone back home was in constant danger of becoming infected. The virus was spreading like wildfire, despite all the attempts to quarantine affected areas.

  Her father would have none of it. “Come now,” he said. “We knew the first attempt would likely fail. And we have another batch of samples ready to run initial tests on. Perhaps the vaccine will be in there.”

  A few people attempted half smiles, at that. He shook his head.

  “This is not science. Science is not about hoping for the result. It is about finding the answer. Slowly, methodically, eliminating each wrong answer until the right one is discovered,” he said.

  Carmen stood up. She still didn’t feel as hopeful as her father, but the melancholy mood wasn’t getting them any closer to curing this disease. “The old man’s right, folks. Let’s get the next set of buns in the oven.” She clapped her hands, and the team chuckled at her jibes, then got back to work. She heaved a sigh. The sooner they got the next trials cooking, the better.

  “Old man?” her father said. He cocked an eyebrow. “Buns in the oven?” His tone sounded scandalized, but he was smiling.

  “Yup. And let’s hope one of these isn’t a wrong answer,” she said.

  “Indeed,” he replied.

  Carmen picked up her tablet, going back over her notes. “It’s pretty obvious why the last trial failed,” she said.

  “Reactivation,” he replied.

  She nodded absently, reading over her notes. They’d used an attenuated virus in the rat trial. Basically, they’d tried to “turn off” a batch of live virus, and injected a specific model of turned off virus into the rats. The theory was sound: their immune systems would think the attenuated virus was live, and would mount an immune response, which would then let them fight off the real virus when they were exposed to it later.

  But what had happened was very different. The attenuated virus had performed as expected in their initial tests, but when it was injected into a live host it reactivated. Their vaccine was as lethal as an exposure to the regular virus.

  “I’m looking over the other plausible models for attenuation, dad. But I don’t think any of them are viable. I think they’re all going to reactivate,” Carmen said.

  He settled back into his chair, rubbing his chin with one hand. “That will make a vaccine more difficult.”

  “We might do better looking for a treatment, instead of a vaccine,” she replied. “I’m noticing that the neuraminidase inhibitors had some effect. Not enough to make a difference,” she went on quickly, because it looked like he was about to object. “But it might be the right track.”

  “Give it a shot,” he said. He picked up his tablet and typed a few words. A moment later, a tome appeared on her tablet. “Doctor Jeremy Greene has been working on that method, back on Earth. I’ve sent you his research.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take a look.” She opened the huge document. How much of it had her father read? He had brought so much data with him, so many reports of research by so many doctors and scientists. Carmen knew he’d been pouring over them as much as he could, but every day more information was flooding up from teams on Earth working the problem.

  Carmen had an advantage over Greene and most others working on the problem, though. Her eyes were open now in a way that most of those scientists were not. She was over the shock of her father’s revelation the night before. Now she was simply determined to unravel the mystery. And unlike most of the people working on a solution, she had an advantage. She knew this virus wasn’t natural. It had been engineered. It was a weapon, not the result of nature. The thought still gave her chills.

  But it might be a good thing. In her experience, that meant it was inherently weak. Nature built things to be strong because things that weren’t strong went away. That’s how evolution worked. But strip away evolution, and all you had was the ingenuity of the people – or aliens – doing the making. She would bet on Mother Nature over someone in a lab any day of the week.

  She was convinced these viruses had a weak spot. She just needed to find it.

  Ideally someplace less distracting. The lab was bustling with people getting ready for the next sequence of testing, and it made reading this Dr. Greene’s documentation more difficult than it ought to be.

  “Dad, I’m going to take this back to my room and give it a
thorough reading.”

  “That’s fine, Carmen. We’ve got time before this batch of buns come out of the oven,” he replied. Then he went very still. “But Carmen? No trips outside the domes this time, please?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, dad. Not planning on it.”

  Carmen wondered how long he was going to play the protective mother hen. She was betting on forever. The man would be in the ground before he stopped trying to protect her from the world. And oh, god, but she would miss him when he left. She stood up to go, but then had an impulse and walked over to him instead. She leaned over and gave her father a kiss on the cheek.

  “And what did I do to deserve such an honor?” he asked her, smiling broadly.

  “Just you, being you,” she said. “And with that, I’m off. Be back in a bit!”

  She stepped brightly from the lab, smiling to herself as she went. It was good to give him a little something nice. He was annoying as all get-out sometimes, but he meant well even when he was being too nosy. And she loved him.

  10

  PATRICK READ the email a third time, still not quite believing what he was seeing. Command back on Earth had given him his marching orders. And they were not at all what he’d expected.

  He snapped his fingers, and the screen shut off. He hadn’t misread any of it. But what were they thinking? He had to talk this over with someone. After her odd reactions the other night, Patrick wasn’t as sure about talking to Amy as he once had been. And there weren’t too many other people on the base who he trusted implicitly.

  What about Carmen, though? She was smart, and able to keep her mouth shut when called for. He hadn’t seen her since running into her just outside sick bay yesterday, and it would be nice to see her anyway. Hell, it would be a lot more than nice.

  “Computer, locate Carmen Rosa, please,” he said. They all wore communication units that allowed tracking, but you had to have authorization to get a location. Only supervisor level personnel could do that. He wasn’t abusing that privilege, he told himself. He was just saving time, finding out where she was.

  “Carmen Rosa is in Dome Four, room sixteen,” the computer replied. It popped up a helpful schematic, just in case he didn’t already know the base by heart. Which he did. That was her room. What was she doing there already? It was only just past ten in the morning. He’d have expected she would still be in the lab.

  Still, this made for an easier quiet conversation anyway. He didn’t need to have a dozen people around while he talked about his command issues. He got up and started moving, a smile slowly tugging at his face.

  It would be good to see her again.

  He reached the door and hesitated. If she was in there, was she there for privacy? She might not welcome the intrusion. Maybe she was sleeping. Or working. If she had wanted to see him, she knew how to find him. He wasn’t ever a difficult man to locate.

  And when had he gotten so damned cautious? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Her opinion of him mattered, sure. But he needed to still be himself. He wasn’t changing who he was, not for her or anyone else. He raised his hand and knocked gently.

  “Come in,” she said through the door.

  He stepped inside, and she looked up. Surprise was the first thing he saw register on her face, but it was followed quickly by a look that he hoped was welcoming. He thought so, anyway. She was draped over her bed, lying on her belly in a way that was incredibly distracting to him. She had a tablet in front of her, open to some sort of book. That was twice he’d stumbled across her when she was reading.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting?” he asked.

  “Ugh, you are, but I could use the break, to be honest.” She set aside the tablet she’d been reading. “This is the driest stuff I’ve read since medical school. What’s up?”

  “I could use your brain, to be honest,” he replied.

  “Oh?” She pulled herself up to a sitting position and swung her legs to the floor. With a sweep of her arm she gestured to the one chair in the room. “Please, have a seat.”

  The bedrooms here on the base were all pretty simple. One bed, one small desk and a chair, and a chest of drawers built into a wall. Everyone got the same, so nobody got to argue about more space or better facilities. It was one thing Patrick had prided himself in about the lunar base, right from the first. Even the leaders of the expedition like himself didn’t have any bigger room than anyone else. Everything was solidly made, most of it right here on the moon by pouring silicon powder into the enormous three-D printer.

  He sat down on the chair, swinging it around to face Carmen. Her eyes caught his immediately and swept him away. For a long moment he couldn’t remember why he was here. All he could think about were those stolen kisses on the Hopper, and how her body had felt pressed up against his.

  “So, you wanted my brain?” she prompted. Her eyes were sparkling.

  He blinked. “Yes.” He blinked again, trying to clear his thoughts. She leaned forward, elbows on knees and chin propped on her hands, her eyes locked on his intently. He took a breath. Important to remember to breathe, he thought wryly.

  “I send a report of what we found back to Earth,” he said.

  She popped up at that. “Right! I heard you over the speakers. Congratulations! All that water – that’s amazing. Just what you were looking for, right?”

  He nodded, her excitement fueling his. “Yes. And we’ll be mining it soon enough. But it looks like they want us to abandon this base.”

  “What?” Her face fell.

  Patrick frowned. He hadn’t wanted to upset her. “Not right away. It’ll take a little while to set up the new base. But we have orders to take all the spare dome parts, pack them up, and set them in place inside the crater with the ice.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, blinking in thought. “How many domes?”

  “Just three,” he said. “That’s what they sent up on the last supply run.”

  “Why only three?” She tapped her tablet a few times. He peeked at what she was working on – she was bringing up lunar topography. She scrolled across to the southern pole, then handed him the tablet.

  “Show me where the crater is?” she asked.

  Patrick knew that landscape by heart. This image was a little funny – not the same as being there. But even so, it wasn’t hard to find the right pool of shadow. He scrolled to the spot and zoomed in.

  “There,” he said, handing the device back to Carmen.

  She had the tablet plunk a few roughly dome-size circles into the crater. They barely filled a corner. The available space was huge. She looked up at him and made eye contact.

  “I see what you mean,” he said. “There’s room for a lot more than three domes in there.”

  “And now there’s oxygen for a lot more than three domes worth of people in there,” she said.

  Patrick made a skeptical noise. “That city you were talking about?”

  “Well, at the time I was thinking about a someday thing. Way in the future,” she said. “But now? There are some really scared people back there on Earth. They moved the best virologist in the world out to the moon – to the moon, Patrick! Why?”

  He looked at her blankly. He’d just followed the orders to bring Dr. Rosa out here. He hadn’t really thought about whether those orders made sense or not. He figured they must… Why would they send the premier research team out to the moon if that wasn’t essential to their research?

  “Because the moon was the best place to research a space based virus?” he suggested.

  “That’s what the media has been saying,” she replied. “The truth is, being up here slowed us down. We lost days prepping to go, days more setting up. And frankly, nothing up here works the way it ought to.”

  He made a protesting sound, which she waved down.

  “No, you run a good base,” she said. “But everything is harder up here. Lab experiments don’t work the way we expect them to in the lower gravity. We have a limited supply of everything – on Earth,
they’d be throwing whatever we needed at us. Here? The nearest place to get new live rats for testing is a two day round trip away.”

  He leaned back in the chair, thinking about her words. If what Carmen was saying was right, why had they sent the team out here at all? Maybe to keep them safe from the virus? But they could do that at the bottom of some mountain fortress. There was no need to go to the moon.

  “Why do you think they did it, then?” he asked.

  “Honestly?” she asked him, looking nervous.

  “Please.”

  “Pat, it sometimes takes decades to create a vaccine for a new virus,” she said. “Now, we’ve gotten better at it over the years. But this virus is…alien.”

  He almost thought she’d meant to say something else, instead of alien. She had paused, and thought over the word for a minute. What was she holding back?

  “So making a vaccine might take a while?” he said.

  “There are some viruses we’ve worked on for decades and still never found a vaccine for. We’ve got some good treatments for HIV, but no vaccine and no cure. We might never be able to solve this one, either,” she said. “I think it’s entirely possible that some people on Earth are hedging their bets. This virus is a death sentence right now, so a city on the moon safe from the virus might be looking a lot more appealing than life on Earth.”

  Patrick made a scoffing sound. “Seriously? I think you give them too much credit, Carmen. Most of them are not like you. Most grounders would never survive up here.”

  “You’d be surprised how much people are willing to live with in order to stay alive,” she said softly.

  He stopped talking and looked at her carefully. He’d never seen Carmen so bereft. Her eyes were cast down at her hands, which sat in her lap palm up. Her shoulders were hunched forward. As he watched, a tear dripped onto one of her hands.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked softly.

  Her voice was so quiet he could barely make out the words. “No one is surviving the infection,” she said. “If we can’t find a cure, we’re looking at a death toll of over a billion people by the end of this year, and two or three billion more next year.”