Pandemic Page 44

Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.

“Um … eighteen million?”

Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.

“Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”

A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.

“One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”

Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.

One hundred and ten million dollars …

“I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”

Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”

The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.

CLEAR YOUR MIND

Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.

Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.

Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”

Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margaret could have seen with the naked eye.

She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

There weren’t any.

Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”

Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.

“Tim, is there any evidence of the black rot in Walker’s brain?”

He shook his head. “No, none.” He looked at Walker’s body. “In fact, I haven’t observed any apoptosis on her at all — according to the normal timeline, we should be seeing that by now. She’s just not rotting like Petrovsky and the other infected victims.”

Melted crawlers … no rot … no growths in the brain …

The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a glorious conclusion.

“Candice was infected by crawlers, but not under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”

“Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”

She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.

“I can’t calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”

Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.

“Your engineered yeast,” she said. “You’ve taken genetic information out of the crawlers, put it into the yeast. You can get your yeast to produce the catalyst that kills the crawlers.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “But like I told you, the catalyst kills the yeast as well. So it’s a dead end.”

“Was a dead end. The hydras survive an environment that kills the crawlers, Tim. If we can figure out how they survive it—”

“Maybe we can put that survival trait in the yeast,” Tim finished, his eyes wide with renewed energy. “Then we could generate huge colonies of yeast that would produce the catalyst … an endless supply of something that kills crawlers dead.”

Margaret reached out, grabbed Tim’s shoulder. If they weren’t in the suits, she might have kissed the man.

“Tim, I think the hydras made Candice immune to the infection, to the crawlers, to all of it. We still don’t know what the hydras are, what else they can do to a host, but if we can figure out how they survive when crawlers die, and if we can reproduce that ability … maybe we can make everyone immune.”

GET LICKED

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy didn’t know much about the original infection.

Like everyone else in the world, he’d been glued to the news when that disaster hit. He’d watched reports of Detroit’s blistering end and the aftermath that followed. He’d heard the endless public service announcements hammering home the acronym “T.E.A.M.S.” Like everyone else, he knew the methods of transmission: get infected by a spore, or get licked — yes, literally licked — by a host.

Chapter end