by Bill Ransom
She thought of David, her exuberant guide, and looked once again at the coded reports. Would there be an invoice here for pieces of him someday?
Today, watching the loading of the stainless-steel refrigerated cases, she wanted to flee more than she’d wanted anything in her life.
Body parts for transplant, she thought, and shook her head in wonder. And a genetic immuno-prophylaxis to guarantee compatibility. No more immunosuppressives, no more searching for just the right donor. Too bad such a great idea had this kind of monster birth.
Marte breathed deeply to quell her fear and her anger. She recalled her only briefing with Mariposa, a long weekend that had brought her over the edge of fatigue. She had wanted to sleep, but the adrenaline of her anger wouldn’t let her. Mariposa had told her about the successful transplants, always for highly placed Children of Eden, and her suspicions about the anonymous donors.
Marte was surprised at the sudden and complete sadness that washed over her. She flicked a tear out of the corner of her eye and took a deep breath.
Poor, poor, pitiful me.
Marte checked her messages, and the board led off with a notice from Casey.
Line conf 1530 Fuse update. Code 3.
“Code three,” she muttered. “I hate code three.”
Marte had participated in two code-three conferences since arrival at ViraVax, and they both gave her the willies. Participation was live, via network, scrambled, and none of the participants was identified except Casey. Casey knew the principals, including his own staff, but some of the questions from anonymous sources gave her the creeps. Some of the questions got her thinking about the “drought and pestilence” charges that had led her here. She was becoming one of them, if only to ensure her cover, and her stomach churned at the thought.
The chronometer in the lower right-hand corner of her viewer read 1530. Big-money buyers from all over the world were waiting, not for what she could do for humanity, but for what she could do to it.
Promptly her screen cleared, her gut wrenched, and the conference began.
She coded a note for the in-house frequency and shipped it to Casey’s mailbox while the introductory data scrolled.
“I hate it when you clear my viewer” was all it said.
Marte hoped that everything that she thought was clearly implied. She dared to hope that she would be deported for her impertinence until the memory of those stainless-steel boxes flashed to mind, and she swallowed hard.
What am I doing here? What have I done?
Casey had handed her a basic architecture and a challenge, possibly a step towards a deeper confidentiality. Out of that architecture, Marte had refined a time bomb for the human body, and a trigger. Now strangers, very powerful strangers, discussed its merits and limitations on her own viewer.
“This animal can stop a body dead in its tracks,” Casey’s briefing materials informed them. “We’ve mastered the autoimmune system, and now we can shut off the mitochondria with a whiff of perfume.”
“Which is like shutting off the body like a switch,” someone said.
The voice, like all of their voices, was converted to print. Not a hint of accent, gender, age.
Marte could imagine Casey in his office as someone took the bait. In her mind, he couldn’t help licking his lips, and his intense eyes bored their gaze into his viewer the way they sometimes bored into her own. At first this intensity had amused her. Now it chilled her.
“Details, please, researcher.”
That was her.
Who wants to know? ran through her mind first. General, President, Oil Baron, King?
Marte knew that the Master didn’t have to bid. He got everything he wanted for free. Casey’s tone sounded from her console, prompting an answer.
“It’s actually three different animals,” she replied.
Her Litespeed translated her speech into typescript so there would be no voice recognition.
“Stage one disarms the immune response. Stage two sets itself up within the mitochondria and, when triggered by stage three, instantly blocks ATP production.”
“And how long is it effective in its dormant state?”
Again, the tone prompt from Casey. He would want to speak with her later about her tardy responses.
“For life,” she said. “Thanks to our work with monoclonal antibodies, it’s resident and undetectable until activated.”
Responses in her viewer:
“Won’t a pheromone trigger deliver an element of unpredictability?”
“Any chemical, including light, becomes a trigger. Pheromones are only one example.”
“So,” someone replied, “you could inoculate an entire army to self-destruct at your command?”
“If you wish,” she replied, and held her head in both hands.
Marte thought of her viruses as babies and talked to them as she talked to herself while working. Now she could see where it had led her. She understood now how the mother of the killer of her parents might have felt.
Sitting a nest of dragons, she thought.
Always, in the past, her viruses, her babies, thrilled her.
Not anymore.
She kept no duplicates of her notes or procedures, and she vowed to destroy this project, and any others she could get her hands on, before she left ViraVax.
The conference ended at 1600 in a blur. All she could think of was David and the other Innocents. David, who squired her everywhere, always smiling, always having a good day.
What will they do to him?
An image of stainless-steel boxes stacked on his cart chilled her through and through. Even so, Marte was soaked in sweat. She used that as an excuse to stand in her shower for a long, long time.
Chapter 28
David left his cart at the Level One elevators, as instructed, and led the others through the maze that bypassed decon. The Angel Dajaj had a mission for them, and David had to deliver the team safely to the Angel.
“I go back now,” Mark said. “Steve be mad, I go back now.”
“Dajaj is boss, not Steve,” David said. “Dajaj says ‘Come,’ so we come.”
“I work hard,” Annie said. “Strong back, good back.”
David, too, was restless. He liked adventure and he liked secrets, but this secret scared him and he didn’t like to be scared. On his cart, he knew what he was doing. A red tag on the package meant follow the red line to deliver it. Brown overalls on passengers meant that he followed the brown line to deliver them to the brown area. Always he got home using the white line. Today the five of them were all different colors, and where he was taking them had no color.
“Pic-nic, pic-nic, pic-nic,” Tomasina chanted.
She shut her eyes tight the whole way down, letting David lead her by the hand when they changed cars. Dajaj had promised a picnic, but they had to hurry to beat the Sabbath.
The Angel Dajaj did not go to the big room on the Sabbath like the others. He taught David and some Innocents how to pray to God every Sabbath, and he gave them a picnic. Dajaj was their friend. He helped the great God to love them and to remember them when nobody else would.
The doors slid back at Level Five, and the Angel Dajaj awaited them. A pile of small green backpacks buried his feet, but he threw open his arms in welcome.
“My children,” he said, “are you ready to meet the Lord?”
“Yes!” David said.
Heads bobbed all around him.
“Yes!”
“Yes!”
“Pic-nic. Pic-nic.”
“We will have our picnic,” the Angel told them. “First, we’ll go for a walk. Everybody pick up one of these packs and put it on. Here, David, let’s show them.”
Dajaj fixed the pack on his back and snugged up the straps for him. It was not heavy at all. The pack that Dajaj picked up for himself looked very heavy, and David was glad he didn’t have to carry that one.
David helped the others amidst the grunts and wet breathing. The hallway was empty ex
cept for their little group, quiet except for some distant barking and the occasional screech of an animal. Topside was always noisy, people jostled people everywhere, so only occasionally did David hear the birdsong and animal cries from outside the perimeter.
Catherine, the youngest, perked up.
“Puppy dogs?” she asked. “See puppy dogs?”
“Not this time,” Dajaj answered. “This time we’re going outside.”
Outside!
David couldn’t remember Outside. He knew that if he got Outside alone he would die, he would walk around and get lost and he would die. The missionaries warned them all about it almost every day. Even the missionaries didn’t go Outside. His heart jumped at the thought, and his fingers absently stroked the surgical scar down the center of his chest.
The Angel Dajaj led them through a room full of noisy fans, into a crawl space and through another hatch. They packed together inside a dark, narrow passage full of cables and pipes. David’s nose was very sensitive and Catherine didn’t smell very good when she pressed against him. Dajaj switched on a hand lamp so they could see, and it was just in time because Annie was already crying.
“Picnic,” Dajaj reminded them. “This way.”
They balanced on the pipes and put their hands on the walls to keep from falling. As it was, everyone except the Angel Dajaj fell more than once. David himself slipped twice, wedging himself between the pipe and the wall. Catherine wouldn’t help him and Dajaj couldn’t get past everybody else, so both times it took him a while to get up.
The passageway was steep, too. Topside, everything was flat and David rode his cart everywhere. Now his thighs burned, he was thirsty, and if Annie wasn’t crying enough for all of them, he would have done it himself. He never wanted the Angel Dajaj to see him cry.
Dajaj stopped them all with a palm up and a finger to his lips. He stood on tiptoe and unfastened another hatch overhead. A bright blast of sunlight watered David’s eyes.
“Outside!” Mark cried.
“Shh!” the Angel whispered. “It’s a surprise.”
Chapter 29
Joshua Casey ran his hand over his head without mussing his tender scalp. The conference had excited him, though Marte’s performance had not. For a moment he had been transported out of ViraVax and the political mess that Mishwe had made of it and into the world he loved best—hustling biological gadgets, making the world a more perfect place, making money for God.
“She’s dangerous,” Shirley said.
He became aware of her hand on his thigh only when she spoke. She gave it a squeeze.
“She’s marginally acceptable,” Casey boomed. “Everyone here has to be ready to sell any portion of their projects at any moment. We’ve always made that clear.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “She’s dangerous because she has secrets.”
Casey chilled.
“What secrets? How do you know?”
Shirley’s hand worked its way higher on his thigh.
“Remember I said I’ve monitored everything that comes across her screen?”
“Go on.”
“Everything relates to her work,” Shirley said. “Her only detectable network contacts are the usual library and data searches related to her projects.”
“What do you mean ‘detectable’?”
Casey could tell by Shirley’s smile that she was quite full of herself. He wished she’d just spit it out instead of dangling it out of his reach. He refused to sit up and beg. He would let her take her time. One day soon, Shirley and her manipulations would be out of his life forever.
“Sometimes a symbol appears on her screen, a butterfly,” she said.
Her hand squeezed again. Casey reached down and removed it.
“Get to it,” he growled. “I’ve got the Master and Mishwe to deal with before sundown.”
“It’s a signal,” she said. “Someone is contacting her, bypassing everything we have. Her responses are also blocked. I think she’s a spy.”
Casey was sure that it was true.
Who?
She arrived the day that Bartlett died, could that be it? And who was Bartlett’s best friend in the outside world?
“Colonel Toledo,” he whispered.
“It’s possible,” Shirley said. “The butterflies always appear just before or after your embassy dump.”
“Then they’re bursting, using our own system and transmissions. . . .”
Casey stood, ran his hand through his hair, sat.
“That new tall guy in Micro, Dwayne, get him on this. If we can’t tap her, maybe we can trap her.”
“I don’t think we can make it by sundown.”
“Then stop thinking and start moving,” he said. “Tell him we want an intercept, and we want to be able to generate that butterfly on her screen ourselves. Then I want a security shakedown of everybody in this facility.”
“Marte Chang’s an exception,” Shirley said. “An outsider. Mishwe is another exception, he’s crazy.”
“It wasn’t timidity,” Casey growled, speaking more to himself than to Shirley, “and it wasn’t cultural. She hesitated. She was thinking. She was weighing, moralizing. . . .”
These last he pronounced with a fist to his desktop.
“A morality different from ours is a luxury she can’t afford.”
“Well, she has impressed you,” Shirley said. “In spite of her. . . hesitation, she has produced for you. Produced quickly, elegantly. And so have her assistants. Before she arrived they were nothing more than overpaid dishwashers.”
Casey smiled, in equal measures charmed by the economic promise of the new projects, by Marte’s naiveté and by the heady prospect of sheer power. Shirley was right. In spite of her moral struggle, her questionable loyalties, Marte was producing. He stroked Shirley’s firm thigh absently. Nothing disgusted Casey more than disloyalty, and Marte Chang was proving herself to be quite disgusting, indeed.
The Sunspots were Toledo’s Trojan horse, he thought. Now I have to question everything, details of her mitochondrial project. . . .
She had not applied to remain on at the completion of her project, and she had not warmed to him, to Shirley, not to anyone. She had appeared loyal, true, but she hadn’t ever felt loyal to him, even in their lunches on the patio. She was not staying, which meant that the knot was tied and the noose slipped. He caught his hand investigating the tender skin above his collar. He moved it back to Shirley’s thigh.
Not even Mishwe is a traitor.
Mishwe, yes, was another matter, a much more pressing matter.
“Are you thinking of Mishwe?” Shirley asked.
She repositioned herself under his hand, then repositioned his hand, then guided his unconscious strokes more to her liking.
Casey dampened his fingers and broadened his field of exploration.
“Why?” he asked.
Her pelvis reached up for his fingers, sucked them in.
“Every time you deal with Mishwe these days you look like you’re having a seizure,” she said. “Wait now. . . oh, shit, oh Jesus. . . . ”
“No bad talk,” he reminded her.
“No,” she said, and pulled his belt buckle free of its clasp.
Casey’s security channel beeped its “urgent” notice, and his chief announced in his clipped manner, “We have a Meltdown situation, sir. Three Innocents. One in the ag shop, another on the lift pad and a third in the field. All went up at once. Details on-screen . . . now.”
Casey stepped out of Shirley’s grip and switched the comdeck from “console” to “council.” His wall lit up and a perimeter pickup bracketed, focused, then zoomed in on a brown mass dripping from its skeleton, fouling a forklift. Casey touched a key and the screen split, bracketing two other lumps of flesh. The one at the lift pad shimmered under a blue flame.
“Oh, God,” Shirley said. “God help them.”
“God help us,” Casey muttered, “if the Master finds out.”
The sec
ond figure had already blended into shadow, becoming nothing more than a stain on the tilled earth. The burned stub of a hoe handle and charred clothing punctuated his death.
“Command?” he snapped.
“Yes, sir.”
“What do we have?”
“Three individuals in Meltdown, sir. We began Sabbath shutdown, so teams are just now sealing off.”
“Nobody goes near them without full gear,” Casey ordered. “I want all residue impounded and sealed, including the concrete from the lift pad, that forklift, the dirt around the field worker. I want to know what set them—”
“Sir,” the chief interrupted, “we have two more cooking in Maintenance right now.”
“Shut down topside operations,” Casey said. “I want their crews in isolation, including missionaries.”
“Sir, shouldn’t we seal off—”
“I’ll decide that,” Casey snapped. “A full seal-off would cost us weeks of production and it would mean notifying Garcia and the embassy that we’ve got a problem. I presume you don’t want an army holding us in here any more than I do. Proceed as I’ve ordered.”
He slapped the “off” key, but not before he noted how pale the chief looked, and how freely he could sweat.
Already Casey had the feeling he had lost, that something had exploded and swept past him and the shock wave came next.
He reopened one screen to see two spacesuited men give a thumbs-up sign, run a final check on their Colts and armor, then trudge towards the ag shop.
Casey was sure where this investigation would lead.
To Dajaj Mishwe, he thought. One way or another. Mishwe, Meltdown and a migraine.
Casey didn’t like that combination, particularly with his father in tow.
“Command?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s the status of Mishwe’s two newcomers?”
“Decon in progress,” the voice announced. “They’re Level Five property, sir. You authorized—”
“Put them on hold,” Casey ordered. “Bring Mishwe to me.”
Chapter 30