“You’re not sorry. You’re on their side.”
“It isn’t a question of sides. In the wrong hands, those shields—”
“Law enforcement is the right hands!”
“Elizabeth, we’ve been over and over this. Let’s not do it again. You know I have no power to get you an energy shield, and I haven’t seen you in so long. Let’s not quarrel.” Marianne heard the pleading note in her own voice. When, in the long and complicated road of parenthood, had she started courting her daughter’s agreement, instead of the other way around?
“Okay, okay. How are you, Mom?”
“Overworked and harried. How are you?”
“Overworked and harried.” A reluctant half-smile. “I can’t stay long. How about a tour?”
“Sure. This is my lab.”
“I meant of the Embassy. I’ve never been inside before, you know, and your ambassador—” somehow Smith had become Marianne’s special burden “—just met with me in a room by the submarine bay. Can I see more? Or are you lab types kept close to your cages?”
The challenge, intended or not, worked. Marianne showed Elizabeth all over the Terran part of the Embassy, accompanied by a security officer whom Elizabeth ignored. Her eyes darted everywhere, noted everything. Finally she said, “Where do the Denebs live?”
“Behind these doors here. No one has ever been in there.”
“Interesting. It’s pretty close to the high-risk labs. And where is Noah?”
Yesterday’s bitter scene with Noah, when he’d been so angry because she’d never told him he was adopted, still felt like an open wound. Marianne didn’t want to admit to Elizabeth that she didn’t know where he’d gone. “He stays in the Terran visitors’ quarters,” she said, hoping there was such a place.
Elizabeth nodded. “I have to report back. Thanks for the Cook’s tour, Mom.”
Marianne wanted to hug her daughter, but Elizabeth had already moved off, heading toward the submarine bay, security at her side. Memory stabbed Marianne: a tiny Elizabeth, five years old, lips set as she walked for the first time toward the school bus she must board alone. It all went by so fast, and when the spore cloud hit, not even memory would be left.
She dashed away the stupid tears and headed back to work.
III: S minus 8.5 months
The auditorium on the Embassy had the same thin, rice-paper-like walls as some of the other non-lab rooms, but these shifted colors like some of the more substantial walls. Slow, complex, subtle patterns in pale colors that reminded Marianne of dissolving oil slicks. Forty seats in rising semi-circles faced a dais, looking exactly like a lecture room at her college. She had an insane desire to regress to undergraduate, pull out a notebook, and doodle in the margin. The seats were filled not with students chewing gum and texting each other, but with some of the planet’s most eminent scientists. This was the first all-hands meeting of the scientists aboard. The dais was empty.
Three Denebs entered from a side door.
Marianne had never seen so many of them together at once. Oddly, the effect was to make them seem more alien, as if their minor differences from Terrans—the larger eyes, spindlier limbs, greater height—increased exponentially as their presence increased arithmetically. Was that Ambassador Smith and Scientist Jones? Yes. The third alien, shorter than the other two and somehow softer, said through the translator in the ceiling, “Thank you all for coming. We have three reports today, two from Terran teams and one from World. First, Dr. Manning.” All three aliens smiled.
Terrence Manning, head of the Spore Team, took the stage. Marianne had never met him, Nobel Prize winners being as far above her scientific level as the sun above mayflies. A small man, he had exactly three strands of hair left on his head, which he tried to coax into a comb-over. Intelligence shone through his diffident, unusually formal manner. Manning had a deep, authoritative voice, a welcome contrast to the mechanical monotony of the ceiling.
From the aliens’ bright-eyed demeanor, Marianne had half expected good news, despite the growing body of data on the ship’s LAN. She was wrong.
“We have not,” Manning said, “been able to grow the virus in cell cultures. As you all know, some viruses simply will not grow in vitro, and this seems to be one of them. Nor have we been able to infect monkeys—any breed of monkey—with spore disease. We will, of course, keep trying. The better news, however, is that we have succeeded in infecting mice.”
Good and bad, Marianne thought. Often, keeping a mouse alive was actually easier than keeping a cell culture growing. But a culture would have given them a more precise measure of the virus’s cytopathic effect on animal tissue, and monkeys were genetically closer to humans than were mice. On the other hand, monkeys were notoriously difficult to work with. They bit, they fought, they injured themselves, they traded parasites and diseases, and they died of things they were not supposed to die from.
Manning continued, “We now have a lot of infected mice and our aerosol expert, Dr. Belsky, has made a determination of how much exposure is needed to cause spore disease in mice under laboratory conditions.”
A graph flashed onto the wall behind Manning: exposure time plotted versus parts per million of spore. Beside Marianne, Evan’s manicured fingers balled into a sudden fist. Infection was fast, and required a shockingly small concentration of virus, even for an airborne pathogen.
“Despite the infected mice,” Manning went on, and now the strain in his voice was palpable, “we still have not been able to isolate the virus. It’s an elusive little bugger.”
No one laughed. Marianne, although this was not her field, knew how difficult it could be to find a virus even after you’d identified the host. They were so tiny; they disappeared into cells or organs; they mutated.
“Basically,” Manning said, running his hand over his head and disarranging his three hairs, “we know almost nothing about this pathogen. Not the r nought—for you astronomers, that is the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period—nor the incubation period nor the genome nor the morphology. What we do know are the composition of the coating encapsulating the virus, the transmission vector, and the resulting pathology in mice.”
Ten minutes of data on the weird, unique coating on the “spores,” a term even the scientists, who knew better, now used. Then Dr. Jessica Yu took Manning’s place on the dais. Marianne had met her in the cafeteria and felt intimidated. The former head of the Special Pathogens branch of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Jessica Yu was diminutive, fifty-ish, and beautiful in a severe, don’t-mess-with-me way. Nobody ever did.
She said, “We are, of course, hoping that gaining insight into the mechanism of the disease in animals will help us figure out how to treat it in humans. These mice were infected three days ago. An hour ago they began to show symptoms, which we wanted all of you to see before… well, before.”
The wall behind Jessica Yu de-opaqued, taking the exposure graphic with it. Or some sort of viewscreen now overlay the wall and the three mice now revealed were someplace else in the Embassy. The mice occupied a large glass cage in what Marianne recognized as a BSL4 lab.
Two of the mice lay flat, twitching and making short whooshing sounds, much amplified by the audio system. No, not amplified—those were desperate gasps as the creatures fought for air. Their tails lashed and their front paws scrambled. They were, Marianne realized, trying to swim away from whatever was downing them.