She turned to look at him. He could just make out her smile. “You’re perceptive. Yes, on Terra. I was a scrappy kid. Juvenile offender, for grand theft auto. Plus a few other things, later. Then I wanted to get a job and go straight, and nobody would hire me. When Noah said anyone with the L-31 mitochondria could leave Earth, I volunteered. Kayla and Austin—he was three then—came with me because…. well, because.”
Salah could guess at the reasons. Isabelle was the strong one, the “scrappy” one. Kayla, with no skills and mother of a toddler, depended on her sister. Kayla had gone uneasily to World, and now blamed Isabelle for it every minute of every day.
He said, “But you were bright. You did well in school. Your speech patterns, your breadth of knowledge—”
“That’s enough about me,” Isabelle said, with more than a touch of belligerence. “What’s your story? Why did you volunteer for this mission?”
Salah drained his wine. How much of his face could she see in the dim light? But she had been honest, so he was, too. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why you volunteered to leave your planet and go to God-knows-what? You don’t know?”
“I’m not sure I know why I’ve done anything in my life.” Except Aisha, but he was not going to tell her that stupid story.
A figure passed above them on the roof, a Ranger on patrol. From its bulk, Mason Kandiss.
Isabelle said, “I tried to volunteer for the Army. They wouldn’t take me.”
“Why not?”
“Heart murmur.”
Instantly he was again a physician. “What are the details? Did you get a prognosis?”
She chuckled, a low sound that, to his surprise, went straight to his groin. “Easy, Doctor. It’s nothing fatal. But the Army didn’t want me.”
But I do. Salah suddenly felt wary: of her, of himself. He stood. “I think I’ll make one more tour of the labs. Check on Marianne, and make sure nobody has caught some weird Kindred disease.”
“We call it ‘World,’ you know. Not ‘Kindred.’”
“I know.”
He made his way from the courtyard into Big Lab, which hummed with urgent, organized activity. Claire gave him a tired smile. Marianne Jenner was asleep, looking wan. Two more heroic women. This place abounded with them. Of course, there was also Kayla.
“World,” not “Kindred.” He would have to remember. In the walkway from the clinic to the Big Lab, he passed two World scientists, tall coppery men with big dark eyes, chattering to each other. Each said, “I greet you, Salah-mak.”
“I greet you, Beela¡. I greet you, Kal^cho.” He wished they would not address him by the honorific for a superior. He was a stranger here.
I love it here, Isabelle had said.
He was a stranger who probably would have to stay forever on World. Or what was left of it, after.
CHAPTER 9
There had been no time to build a biosafety level 4 lab. No time, no materials, no expertise at the level required. The imitation of Terran facilities, where Kindred had been carrying on its fruitless search for a vaccine, had been destroyed in the Russian attack, along with its researchers. Marianne, Claire, and Branch improvised.
“Put in the mice,” she said to Branch Carter. The young tech acted as if he hadn’t been seized by a homegrown terrorist and nearly killed. After the first shock of discovering the time jump, Branch had seemed to adopt a stance of energetic we-must-carry-on. Well, they were all carrying on. Branch’s ability with hardware was turning out to be indispensable. As equipment, solicited and bargained for by Noah and Isabelle, arrived from clinics around southern Kindred, Branch modified it to create what they needed. He cannibalized some items to create something else. He jerry-rigged and connected and improvised, a human version of duct tape.
Branch said, “Dr. Jenner”—she’d given up on getting him to call her Marianne—“they’re not mice.”
Of course they weren’t. They were leelees, rounder and smellier and purple. But Marianne had spent years working with mice; old tapes die hard.
Branch brought three of the animals to one of the two glass cages on the bench. Airtight, each cage had been rigged with a negative-pressure system and three redundant air filters, the best available on Kindred, with specs that should stop R. sporii. One advantage: R. sporii was large for a virus. But if the filters didn’t stop the spores, if they got loose from the lab, Marianne might kill a lot of people before the cloud did. But there was no choice; to test the synthesized vaccine, you needed to first determine that something was susceptible to the disease, then vaccinate that something, and then expose it. Leelees were the something they had that was closest to the human genome.
Spores for the experiment had come from Claire’s suitcase. She’d admitted freely to the vaccines, which used inactivated pathogens. She had not, however, admitted to the sealed packet of live spores also in the suitcase. Only a handful of people knew that the means to bring on a spore cloud early resided in the locked metal cabinet in a corner of the leelee lab: the compound researchers, Terran and Kindred; Isabelle; Noah; the Mother of Mothers. Marianne did not want to start a panic. Branch, who seemed immune to the leelee smell, slept in the lab, guarding the cabinet and the experiments.
What had Claire been thinking, to bring live spores down in the shuttle? Had she suspected that there was as yet no vaccine on Kindred? Marianne had asked her.
“Yes,” Claire had said in her musical accent. “It always struck me as suspicious that the Kindred traveled all the way to Earth for help in developing a vaccine. I mean, when they were advanced enough to build a spaceship.” She’d looked Marianne straight in the eye as she said it. Marianne had not replied; Claire was not the person she needed to have that conversation with.
Soon.
The leelees, one held in each of Branch’s hands by their short tails, chittered. He dropped them into the negative-pressure cage. Claire Patel and the two senior Kindred scientists, Llaa^moh¡ and Ka^graa, watched, all of them taut as guitar strings. Ka^graa’s mouth twisted in a grimace. Branch turned on the filtration systems and negative-pressure blower, and pressed the lever that released live spores into the cage.
The leelees scampered and chittered.
The spores took about twenty minutes to shed their dormancy and begin to propagate—or, at least, they had taken twenty minutes on Earth. Incubation period for the disease was three days in mice. Who knew what it was in leelees? Eventually, the leelees would be either dead or still scampering. If dead, Marianne had her test animals. If not, they would have to move on to another animal. If they ran out of either species or time, the synthetic vaccine would have to be administered to humans with no testing.
The problem with that protocol, of course, was that the vaccine would’ve been synthesized using available processes, grown on available cultures, guessed at with inadequate facilities. The synthesized vaccine would not be the exact duplicate of the Terran version, and the Kindred bodies were not the exact duplicates of Terran bodies, so who knew how well—or if at all—the synthesized version would protect?
She watched the purplish animals sniff the glass walls of the cage, climb over the pieces of karthwood that Branch had put in. At least behind glass, they could be neither smelled nor heard.
Branch said, pointlessly, “Now we wait.” Ka^graa nodded. He and Llaa^moh¡ were picking up English quickly, but it scarcely mattered. Everybody knew they had to wait.
Marianne, weary, went to her own bed. Unlike everyone else, she had a room to herself, in what had been a closet. In both the clinic and Big Lab, bunks were jammed wherever possible. No one wanted to be away from the work, and Lieutenant Lamont had insisted on as much containment as possible. Only Isabelle, Noah, and Llaa^moh¡ went back and forth to the karthwood lahk house on the hill. Kayla and Lily were there, too, under the care of a sister of Llaa^moh¡.