“Whatever caused the watertight seals to break down might also have taken out the glove-box array.”
“Maybe. Probably. And doesn’t that suggest to you a hazard of the first order?”
She thought about it. “All we have that would make Pod Six unique is a heavy algal infestation in the sensor arrays?”
“I don’t know about unique. It’s a matter of degree. But in the sense you mean, yes.”
“Can I look at these organisms?”
“Certainly.”
Freeman Li had hedged Degrandpre’s bet by confining his staff to the upper two pods of the chain, where they could make a quick escape to the shuttle bay if the need arose. The remaining three pods had been closed and sealed. That cut into station productivity in general and interrupted at least two very promising research lines, but, Li said flatly, “That’s Degrandpre’s problem, not mine.”
It was a laudably Kuiper-like sentiment, Elam thought.
She followed him down a narrow access shaft to the lowermost of the occupied pods. The bulkheads caught her eye as she passed beneath them: immense steel pressure doors ready to snap shut in an unforgiving fraction of a second. In that awful Terrestrial novel, there had been a passage about a mouse walking into a trap. She had never seen a mouse or a mousetrap, but she imagined she knew how the animal felt.
Precautions in the microbiology lab, never less than stringent under Freeman’s watch, had been tuned since the accident to a fine pitch. Until further notice, all Isian biota and isolates were to be treated as proven hot Level Five threats. In the lab’s secured anteroom, Elam donned the requisite pressurized suit with shoulderpack air and temperature controls. As did Li, and with his headgear in place he looked peculiar: hollow-eyed, somber. He guided her through the preliminary washdown, past similarly dressed men and women working at glove boxes of varying complexity, through yet another airlocked antechamber and into a smaller, unoccupied lab.
Elam felt some of the terror she had first felt on entering a Level Five viral-research lab during her training on Earth. Of course, it had been worse then. She had been a naive Kuiper student raised on Crane Clan tales of the horrors of the Terrestrial plague years. The great divide between Earth and the Kuiper colonies had always been a biological chasm, deeper in its way than the simple distances of space. The Kuiper clans enforced a quarantine: no one was permitted to arrive or return from Earth unless he or she was scrubbed of all Terrestrial disease organisms, down to the cellular level. Terrestrial/Kuiper decon was grueling, physically difficult, and as lengthy as the long loop orbit from the inner system. There had never been an outbreak of Terrestrial disease on an inhabited Kuiper body; had there been, the settlement in question would have been instantly quarantined and decontaminated—hygiene protocols that would have been impractical on Earth, with its dense and mostly impoverished population.
Elam. had gone to Earth for her post-doc the way a fastidious social worker might consent to enter a leper colony: squeamishly, but with the best of intentions. She was inoculated for every imaginable necrophage, prion, bacteria, or virus; nevertheless, she came down with a. classic “fever of unknown origin” that persisted through the first month of her orientation before it finally yielded to a series of leukocyte injections. She had never been sick in her life before that day. Being sick, being infected with some invisible parasite, was … well, even worse than she had imagined.
After that, her first attempt at sterile work had terrified her. The University of Madrid was a Devices and Personnel stronghold full of offworld students, mainly Martians but including several Kuiper expats like herself. Novices weren’t allowed in the same room with live infectious agents. She had already been introduced to anthrax, HIV, Nelson-Cahill 1 and 2, Leung’s Dengue, and the vast array of hemorrhagic retroviruses, but strictly by telepresence. Virus-handling of the kind required by Terrestrial fieldwork was infinitely more dangerous. Here were all the antique horrors of Earth, predators more subtle and tenacious than jungle animals and just as lively, still stalking the malnourished populations of Africa, Asia, Europe. Shepherd’s crooks and rainbow-colored protein loops, all brimming with death.
Planetary ecology, she had thought. Ancient and unbelievably hostile. This was Tam’s bios made tangible, the involute residue of evolutionary eons.
But at least Earth had accommodated mankind into the equation, for all the deadliness of its plagues. Isis had brokered no such deal.
She watched as Li put his hands into a glove box. No telepresence here, either, barring the devices that translated his hand motions to the manipulators deep in the vault-like specimen barrels. A glove-box microcamera fed images to Li’s headgear and to a monitor where Elam could watch his work. The image of a linked group of living cells filled the screen.
“This is the little bastard that’s been fouling our externals. Grows in colonies, a slimy blue film. And yes, there was an inert sample from this culture in Pod Six, but I can’t believe there’s any causal connection. As a matter of fact—”
The image listed like a sinking ship. “Li? You’re losing focus.”
“This gear is as old as the station. Degrandpre’s been sitting on our maintenance requests for more than a year. Afraid he’ll offend the budget people, the timid bastard. Hold on… Better?”
Yes, better. Elam peered at the organism on-screen, fighting an urge to hold her breath. The cell was multinucleated, its spiky protein coat notched like a cog in a clockwork. Mitochondrial bodies, more varied and complex than their Terrestrial counterparts, transited between the fat nuclei and the armored cell walls, sparking quick osmotic exchanges. None of the processes were as well understood as the microbiologists liked to pretend. Different bios, different rules.
“Looks like our gunk,” Elam said.
“Pardon me?”
“Bacterial slimes on the external seals.”
“Like this?”
“Well, not exactly. Yours are ocean dwellers, ours are airborne. I don’t recognize those granular bodies in the miotic canali. But the way they lock together is awfully familiar. Um, Li, you’re losing the image again.”
Freeman Li said, uncharacteristically, “Fuck!” His shoulders straightened sharply. There was a pause. The image swam into an unrecognizable meshwork of colored pixels, and this time it didn’t resolve.
Then. Li said in a brittle tone, “Leave the chamber, Elam.”
There was a sudden hissing sound she couldn’t identify. Elam felt the first touch of real fear now—a tingle in her jaw, a dull roar in her ears. “Li, what is it?”
He didn’t answer. Under his protective gear, he had begun to tremble.
Instantly, her mouth went dry. “God, Li—”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
She moved without thinking. Her lab reflexes weren’t fresh but they were deeply ingrained. He hadn’t asked her for help; he had issued an order, on the authority of whatever it was he’d seen in the glove box.
She ran for the lab door, but it was already gliding shut, a slab of oiled steel. Ceiling fans roared to life, producing negative pressure and drawing possibly contaminated air up into series of HEP A and nano filters. A siren began to wail through the pod. It sounded, Elam thought madly, like a screaming child. She moved toward the door as the gap narrowed, knowing even as she ran that the margin, of time was impossibly thin; she was already, in effect, sealed inside.
She turned, gasping, as the bulkhead slid into place. The pod was airtight now. The fans stopped, though the siren continued to shriek.
Freeman Li had taken his hands away from the glove box. Something had peeled away patches of his suit and gloves, turned the impermeable membranes into scabs of onionskin. Whole sections of raw flesh were exposed and beginning to blister.