The Susquehanna Virus Box Set

by Steve McEllistrem

  Jeremiah looked at Zora, sadness and pain written on the frown lines of his face. He said, “We’re no match for their power.”

  Zora nodded. “True, but we may be able to force them to a draw.” She leaned forward, hands on knees, compressing her breasts as they came level with Jeremiah’s face. His eyes dropped briefly to her chest. If this was a clumsy initial attempt at seduction, Zora was going to be a world-class temptress. “With the last Las-cannon, we can at least defend ourselves until we figure out a strategy. How much time do we have?”

  “Maybe a couple days before they come for us.”

  Zora straightened and caught Lendra’s eye. “I ought to kill you, Witchy Poo,” she gestured to Jeremiah, “even though he doesn’t want me to. Give me a reason to keep you alive.”

  “I understand nanotechnology,” Lendra said. “I can analyze the nanobots. And I’ll help deconstruct Eli’s program. As Jeremiah said, we’re all in this together. For some reason, that never occurred to me before. But I give you my word I won’t try anything.”

  “What’s your word worth,” Zora said, “after what you did to him?”

  “I’m sorry I betrayed you, Jeremiah,” Lendra said. “But I’m not sorry I’m carrying your daughter. I do love you in my own confused way.”

  “Touching,” Zora said. “Let’s go. You’ve got a lot to do to buy your life.” She took Lendra’s arm and walked her out the door. Lendra looked back at Jeremiah as they left. But his eyes were focused on the beautiful Zora. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. She’s a child.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Taditha Poole tried to concentrate on the twisting double helix of Zora’s DNA under her Powerscope, but Curtik continued to babble from his bed in the next room and Rendela and Kammilee refused to close the door, insisting that they needed to watch him as well as guard Poole.

  “I looked at your neck but it wasn’t bent, so I thought I would give it a strangle,” Curtik sang out. “Then your arms would go limp and you’d be a big gimp and your head would suddenly start to dangle.”

  Poole glared over at Curtik and shook her head. She felt like she was close to discovering something, but found it difficult to concentrate. It didn’t help that Curtik’s rhymes were all just that little bit off.

  “You want another stimulant?” Rendela asked.

  With a broad grin, Kammilee jumped off her stool, a hypo pad held high.

  “No,” Poole said.

  At a gesture from Rendela, Kammilee sighed and returned to her stool. Poole bent back over her Powerscope, comparing Zora’s DNA sample to an older one she had on file. The computer had found no major discrepancies in any alleles, so Poole was now checking minor differences. She hadn’t slept in over 24 hours. Probably no one had. An urgency had come over the Moon. Every time Poole took her allotted break—walking around the main hangar to relax her mind—cadets watched her with accusation in their eyes. And why not? She deserved the blame, at least partly.

  Each cadet reminded her of what her baby might become, should she survive long enough to give birth. How she missed Jack Marschenko—despite their short time together.

  Poole stared at the same sequence of Zora’s DNA she’d been studying for the past few minutes, her mind drifting with fatigue, unable to process what she was seeing. Again she looked up, her eyes wandering past Rendela and Kammilee to the open door, through which Curtik’s bed was visible. He caught Poole staring at him. His mouth ticked up in an uncontrolled twitch as he chanted: “I looked to the Earth and saw its great girth and decided I have to be cruel, but my Las-cannon’s broke and my body’s a joke and my doctor’s just Piscine in the pool.” He giggled, while the girl in the bed beside him slept on.

  Poole arched her back until it cracked, took a deep breath and returned to her Powerscope.

  She retrieved the data on Curtik’s DNA, noting the cellular degeneration and increasing molecular dissimulation: indicators that Curtik would devolve like Damon. She flipped back to Rendela’s sample. Like Zora’s, it showed virtually no change. Even the nanobots surrounding the cells behaved the same—snowflakes, submarines, eels and clusters—the four nanobot shapes. Curtik’s nanobots showed some variance from earlier samples—moving at a much more rapid pace. But that was likely due to their efforts to repair the damage to his DNA. So the problem apparently wasn’t in the nanobots. But it had to be. And somehow it had to express itself in the genetic code. She went back to Zora’s sample.

  For a moment Poole lost the allele she was working on. It took her a few seconds to find it again. She adjusted the view and that was when she saw a mutation in one protein. She’d missed it before, or maybe the mutation hadn’t occurred yet when the computer analyzed Zora’s DNA. That little change was enough to alert Poole that the stress of the situation would eventually take its toll.

  Zora would devolve.

  Poole quickly slipped Rendela’s slide into the Powerscope. At the same gene sequence she saw nothing out of place. How could that be? Had she not seen what she thought she had? Why wasn’t the problem occurring in Rendela’s DNA? She had to be missing something. She checked a neighboring sequence and then another, and there it was: a similar mutation.

  Which meant that all the cadets would devolve. She looked up at Rendela, who frowned briefly and said, “What is it? What did you find?”

  “A mutation,” Poole replied.

  “Hold on,” Rendela said. Her eyes lost their focus for a moment. “Zora’s sending Devereaux.”

  Less than a minute later Devereaux entered the room with Dr. Wellon. “You okay?” Devereaux asked.

  Poole nodded. “Just tired.”

  Dr. Wellon said, “I could give you a mild stimulant.”

  Again Kammilee jumped off her stool, hypo pad at the ready.

  “Back off, bitch!” Poole raised her hands as Kammilee and Rendela giggled. “Why does everyone keep pushing those?”

  “Maybe because you don’t look well,” Devereaux said as Rendela gestured for Kammilee to return to her seat. “What have you found?”

  When Poole explained the mutations she’d spotted, Dr. Wellon bent over the Powerscope and confirmed the find. “There’s something else,” Dr. Wellon said in her deep rumble. “I can’t quite place it. But something’s different about the sample.”

  Devereaux took a turn at the Powerscope; he spent a long time hunched over the eyepiece, his hands fiddling with the controls as he manipulated the various slides. Curtik, his arms and legs secured by the straps, sat up in his bed looking on from the next room.

  “Piscine in the pool has spotted the trap,” Curtik sang, “Beef Wellington has narrowed the gap. God Himself will find the solution or else we will all enjoy our devolution.”

  “God,” Poole said, “I wish you would get the rhythm of your rhymes right.”

  “He’s doing that on purpose,” Rendela said. “Trying to annoy us.”

  “He’s succeeding,” Poole replied. She wondered at the mechanism that caused Damon, the least aggressive cadet, to spiral into near-constant violence during his devolution while Curtik, the most aggressive, was turning to poetry. That deviation should be explored. She made a note to herself in her interface.

  “Interesting,” Devereaux said. He straightened, rubbed his lower back and pointed to the Powerscope. “It looks like the nanobots may be engineering the mutations rather than simply issuing directives to the cells to mutate. We have to get this information to Zora right away. Perhaps Dr. Hackett can assist us. He’s an expert on nanotechnology.”

  “Hack’emup, whack ’em up,” Curtik sang. “Soon we’ll have to pack ’em up. In coffins, get it?” He cackled. “Hackett’ll kill us, unless that’s his aim. Then we’ll survive, though we’ll all become very lame.”

  “Curtik,” Rendela said, “get some sleep.” She closed the door to Curtik’s room, then gestured for Poole and Devereaux to precede her to t
he lab.

  “We’ve analyzed the results of Damon’s autopsy,” Devereaux said as they walked, “and we confirmed that the nanobots caused the deterioration. But we couldn’t ascertain how it was being done. This finding of yours, however, looks promising.”

  “What progress has Zora made?” Poole asked.

  “She just broke the code on the encrypted program hidden in your files,” Devereaux said. “Apparently Lendra was able to crack the algorithms. Now they’re examining the devolutionary commands.”

  When they reached the lab, Poole saw a dozen Escala sitting hunched over Powerscopes along one wall, Quekri among them. On the opposite wall, Dr. Hackett and his team worked at another bank of Powerscopes. Aspen stood in the middle of the room with a Las-rifle. And closest to the door, Zora also stood at a Powerscope, Lendra by her side. Zora looked up at their entrance. “You found something,” she said.

  Devereaux nodded and gestured toward Poole. “Actually, Dr. Poole spotted it first. A mutation.”

  “Where?” Zora asked.

  Poole handed over the slide. “In the L-6 quadrant.”

  As Zora studied the slide, Devereaux said, “Dr. Wellon noticed something odd. So I looked and saw a confused pattern among three nanobots—all clusters.”

  “The coordinators,” Zora said.

  “Exactly,” Devereaux replied. “I reconfigured them, activating their transmitters. This is where it gets interesting. When I uploaded the most current data from them, I got a corrosive signal.”

  “We didn’t get any corrosive signals,” Zora said. “We reconfigured a dozen nanotransmitters an hour ago.”

  Devereaux nodded, a smile spreading across his face. “I didn’t get it on any of my samples either. It only happened with the three nanobot clusters in the sample Dr. Poole was studying. This is guesswork now but I believe the sabotage programs were designed to awaken in only a small percentage of the nanobots implanted in each of you. It’s brilliant. Makes the sabotage almost impossible to find. A further guess is that the selected nanobots were programmed to attack the DNA before they corroded, so any study of tissue samples would yield a negative result for devolution until after the process had begun. Which means we’re not going to find corrosive signals until after the mutations occur. So we’re going to have to fix the nanobots systemwide.”

  Can’t we just eliminate them?” Poole asked.

  “No,” Zora and Devereaux said together. Devereaux motioned for Zora to continue. Zora tilted her head in a slight bow.

  “Our nanobots are different from the ones in the Elite Ops,” she said. “Theirs are completely external, functioning as a supplement to the body’s natural processes. Most of ours, however, act essentially as symbionts, attaching themselves to various organisms and becoming part of the lungs, liver, brain, all the major organs. Ours can evolve. The Elite Ops’ nanobots can’t. And that’s how ours could be programmed to devolve.”

  “Exactly,” Devereaux nodded, looking on like a proud father.

  “So how do we fix them?” Poole asked.

  Devereaux and Zora looked at each other. Zora said, “We need time to deconstruct Witchy Poo’s program.”

  “It’s not my program,” Lendra said. “I had nothing to do with it. I was only supposed to activate it.”

  “You keep saying that,” Zora said, “but I can’t think of a reason to believe you.”

  “I wasn’t even working for Eli five years ago.”

  “Who said the program was created five years ago?” Zora turned to stare at Hackett. “And how do we even know the corrosive nanobots were implanted when we were abducted? They could have been injected any time in the past five years by any of our medical team.”

  Hackett paled. “No, Zora. I’m a doctor. I took an oath.”

  “Hm,” Zora said. “You’re the one who handled all our nanotechnology. You’re the logical choice.

  “I . . . I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  Poole caught the tiny squeak in Hackett’s voice and figured he was lying. Lendra caught it too, for her eyes widened slightly, but Zora seemed not to notice. More likely, she decided to let Hackett think he got away with it.

  Zora said, “We’ll worry about that later.” She turned to Poole. “For now, Lendra, Devereaux and I will work on a fix while you, Dr. Hackett and the other members of his team will treat any cadets who exhibit symptoms of devolution. I’ve already received several requests for medical assistance. Probably just nerves. Psychosomatic symptoms. But you will treat them promptly and you will put their minds at ease. Understood?”

  “Yes,” Poole replied. “Thank you.”

  “I probably ought to kill Witchy Poo, you and Hack’emup. You make any mistakes and I won’t have any reason to keep you alive.”

  Poole felt her insides stirring, wondered if she were about to vomit again. Bile rose up in her throat. She swallowed it down and said, “We won’t make any mistakes.”

  Quekri said, “What about us?”

  Zora said. “You will continue to assist us.”

  “Under armed guard? I hardly think that’s necessary. I promise we’ll work on this as long as it takes.”

  Zora smiled. “I’ve been promised many things by many people. I don’t remember any of those promises coming true.”

  “But if you all devolve,” Quekri said, “you may kill everyone on the Moon. Do you want to take us out with you?”

  Zora walked over to Quekri, a petite doll confronting a giantess. “When do you stop working on the problem? When you know the final breakdown is inevitable? Or when you realize we can’t stop you from completing your spacecraft? And even if you make the promise, what’s to keep your fellow Escala from honoring it? They might decide they no longer want your leadership. They may lock you up and kill us themselves. They might . . .” Zora shrugged, turned away. “They might do a lot of things. I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “What about me?” Devereaux said. “What if I promised to keep the research going as long as it takes, until you’re cured or dead?”

  Poole cringed at his bluntness. Zora went still. She stared at Devereaux for a moment, smiled sadly and said, “Get to work.”

  * * *

  Poole said nothing to Hackett and his team as they prepared hypo pads of euphoramine, neo-dopamine and a muscle relaxant. Before they finished, Shiloh entered the admitting room, Phan at her heels. Shiloh was trembling, her finger twitching beside the trigger of her Las-rifle. Phan didn’t look much better. He shifted from foot to foot, jittery.

  Hackett said to Shiloh, “Could you at least put your weapon down? I don’t want to be shot while examining you.”

  “You aren’t touching me,” Shiloh said.

  Hackett raised his hands. “The complications arising from my treatment of your friend were not my fault. Wee Willie’s system isn’t really human anymore. None of your systems are. The nanobots combined with the animal DNA create original problems that a doctor can’t necessarily comprehend. Perhaps a vet—” Hackett paled as he stopped himself.

  “A veterinarian?” Shiloh said, her finger going to the trigger as her Las-rifle came up, the weapon shaking in her hands. “Somebody who knows about lizards and snakes?”

  “I meant no offense,” Hackett said, backing away, stopping only when he ran into Dr. Maria Immaculata Garcia Delgado, a tall Argentinian with flowing black hair that dangled to her waist. She grabbed Hackett’s arm and pulled him aside in a protective gesture, her body shielding him. Poole had almost forgotten that she and Hackett were lovers. Garcia was the kind of spitfire who was willing to lose her life in a grand gesture. Poole hoped she wouldn’t do anything stupid. Behind her, Dr. van Wyck, the blond South African, and Dr. Lee, the short, stocky Korean—both recently rotated up to the Moon—backed against the wall, while Drs. Nakamura and Srinlangshiran—the married nanotech experts who should have rotated out by now
—sat tensely in the corner.

  “Get away from me,” Shiloh said. She aimed her Las-rifle at Poole. “You. Piscine. Fix me.”

  “Calm down,” Poole said. How she hated that nickname. “Try not to get excited. This is not true devolution. It’s a temporary condition driven by stress. You’ve got weeks before you begin to break down. Maybe months.”

  “Yeah,” Shiloh said as she poked Poole in the chest, “you sure diagnosed Curtik real well.”

  Poole rubbed herself where Shiloh’s Las-rifle had hit her. “I didn’t know your nanobots had been sabotaged. My information was limited and mostly wrong. So I had no way to diagnose the problem.”

  “I don’t care. Just fix it. Fix me. Now!”

  Poole reached for a hypo pad and pressed it to the back of Shiloh’s hand. The cadet’s body twitched as the drugs took effect. Her face suffused with blood, her head jerked back and forth, her hand tightened on her Las-rifle.

  “What the hell did you do to me?” Shiloh asked, lifting the Las-rifle and aiming it between Poole’s eyes. Phan stepped back toward the door, bringing his Las-rifle up and pointing it at Hackett.

  Poole wanted to scream. It took all her self-control not to. She couldn’t even open her mouth for fear that a scream would come out. I’m not going to beg, she thought. I will die with dignity.

  Garcia stepped forward and said to Shiloh, “Your body is fighting the drugs.”

  “Particularly the nanobots,” Hackett added.

  Shiloh swung around, her Las-rifle moving with her, lining up on Hackett. Poole shuddered with relief and began to breathe again.

  “I don’t think so,” Shiloh said. “It should have . . . oh.” She smiled broadly. Her eyes widened slightly. “Okay, now it’s working. You gotta try this, Phan.”

  “You all right?” Phan asked.

  “Oh, yeah. It’s good.”

  “I’m next then,” Phan said.

  “But you’re not—” Hackett began, then stopped as van Wyck grabbed his shoulder.

  Poole waited for her hands to stop trembling and pressed a pad to Phan’s hand. Since he wasn’t as agitated as Shiloh, he didn’t twitch as badly while his body fought the drugs. He began to laugh—a crazed, almost demented giggle that erupted into a bark every few seconds.