The boy turned, startled. Saw Ken. Saw the eyes.
"Nice caps," he said approvingly. "I was into rifters myself back before, you know…"
Rifters, Taka remembered. They'd run geothermal stations way off the west coast…
"The missiles," Ken said. "Do you remember how many there were?"
"Dunno. Like, maybe four or five that I saw, but you know."
"Were there lifters? Was there a burn?"
"Yeah, someone said there might be. That was why we all scrambled."
"But was there?"
"I dunno. I didn't hang around. You guys wanted this stuff fast, right?"
"Yes. Yes." Taka looked at the fouled, greasy wad in the bag. It was the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen. "Ricketts, thank you. You have no idea how important this could be."
"Yeah, well if you really wanna be grateful how about a charge off your rig?" He slapped the bike between his thighs. "This thing is like down to the moho, I've got maybe another ten klicks and—or hey, is there maybe some kinda reward?"
The reward, Taka thought, unlocking the umbilical for Rickett's bike, is that all of us might not be dead in ten years.
She fed the treasure into the sample port with tender reverence, let Miri slice away the packaging and squeeze the gold from the dross. And there was gold, evident as much in what wasn't there as in what was: ßehemoth was far below the usual baseline in this sample. Almost negligible.
Something's killing the witch. That initial explanation, that validation of a belief already grown from hope to near-certainty over the past weeks, threatened to squash all the scientific caution Taka's training had instilled in her. She forced caution onto her excitement. She would run the tests. She would do the legwork. But some squealing inner undergrad knew it would only confirm what she already knew, what this first glorious result suggested. Something was killing the witch.
And there it was. Mixed in with the molds and the fungi and the fecal coliform, it glimmered like a string of pearls half-buried in mud: a genetic sequence that Miri's database didn't recognize. She brought it up, and blinked. That can't be right. She whistled through her teeth.
"What?" Laurie asked at her elbow.
"This is going to take longer than I thought," Taka said.
"Why?"
"Because I've never seen anything like this before."
"Maybe we have," Ken said.
"I don't think so. Not unless you've—" Taka stopped. Miri was flashing an interface alert at her: someone asking for download access.
She looked at Ken. "Is that you?"
He nodded. "It's the sequence for a new bug we encountered recently."
"Encountered where?"
"Nowhere local. An isolated area."
"What, a lab? A mountaintop? The Mariana Trench?"
Ken didn't answer. His data knocked patiently at Miri's front door.
Finally, Taka let it in. "You think this is the same thing?" she asked as the system filtered it for nasties.
"It's possible."
"You had it all the while, and this is the first time you've shown it to me."
"This is the first time you had anything to compare it with."
"Sweet smoking Jesus, Ken. You're not much of a team player, are you?" At least it answered one question: now she knew why these two had hung around for so long.
"It's not a counteragent," Laurie said, as if to gird her against inevitable disappointment.
Taka called up the new sequence. "So I see." She shook her head. "It's not our mystery bug either."
"Really?" Laurie looked surprised. "You can tell that after five seconds?"
"It looks like ßehemoth."
"It's not," Ken assured her.
"Maybe a new strain, then. I'd have to grind through the whole sequence to be sure, but I can tell just by looking that it's an RNA bug."
"The biosol isn't?"
"I don't know what it is. It's a nucleic acid of some kind, but the sugar's got a four-carbon ring. I've never seen it before and it doesn't seem to be in any of Miri's cheat sheets. I'm going to have to take it from scratch."
A look passed between Ken and Laurie. It spoke volumes, but not to her.
"Don't let us stop you," Ken said.
Miri could identify known diseases, and cure those for which cures had been found. It could generate random variants of the usual targeted antibiotics, and prescribe regimens that might keep ahead of your average bug's ability to evolve countermeasures. It could fix broken bones, excise tumors, and heal all manner of physical trauma. When it came to ßehemoth it was little more than a palliative center on wheels, of course, but even that was better than nothing. All in all, the MI was a miracle of modern medical technology—but it was a field hospital, not a research lab. It could sequence novel genomes, as long as the template was familiar, but that wasn't what it had been built for.
Genomes based on unfamiliar templates were another thing entirely. This bug wasn't DNA or RNA—not even the primitive, barely-helical variant of RNA that ßehemoth hung its hat on. It was something else altogether, and Miri's database had never been designed to deal with anything like it.
Taka didn't give a damn. She made it do that anyway.
She found the template easily enough once she looked beyond the nuts-and-bolts sequencing routines. It was right there in a dusty corner of the biomed encyclopedia: TNA. A threose-based nucleic acid first synthesized back at the turn of the century. The usual bases attached to a threose sugar-phosphate backbone, with phosphodiester bonds connecting the nucleotides. Some early theoretical work had suggested that it might have played a vital role back when life was still getting started, but everyone had pretty much forgotten about it after the Martian Panspermians won the day.
A novel template meant novel genes. The standard reference database was virtually useless. Decoding the new sequence with the tools in Miri's arsenal was like digging a tunnel with a teaspoon: you could do it, but you had to be really motivated. Fortunately Taka had motivation up to here. She dug in, knowing it would just take time, and maybe a few unavoidable detours down blind alleys.
Too much time. Way too many detours. And what bugged Taka was, she knew the answer already. She'd known almost before she'd started. Every painstaking, laborious, mind-numbing test supported it. Every electrophoretic band, every virtual blot, every PCR and TTD—all these haphazard techniques stapled together hour after bloody hour—they all pointed, glacially, implacably, to the same glorious answer.
And it was a glorious answer. So after three days, tired of the endless triple-checks and replicates, she decided to just go with what she had. She presented her findings near midday back at the cove, for privacy and the convenience of a ready charge.
"It's not just a tweak job," she told the rifters. A lone bedraggled gull picked its way among the stones. "It's a totally artificial organism, designed from scratch. And it was designed to outcompete ßehemoth on its own turf. It's got a TNA template, which is fairly primitive, but it also uses small RNA's in a way that ßehemoth never did—that's an advanced trait, a eukaryotic trait. It uses proline for catalysis. A single amino acid doing the job of a whole enzyme—do you have any idea how much space that saves—?"
No. They didn't. The blank looks made that more than obvious.
She cut to the chase. "The bottom line, my friends, is if you throw this little guy into culture with ßehemoth it'll come out the winner every time."
"In culture," Ken repeated.
"No reason to think it won't do the same in the wild. Remember, it was designed to make its own way in the world; the plan was obviously to just dump it into the system as an aerosol and leave it to its own devices."