She stepped out into a small ante-room full of white rubber boots placed in pairs on the floor around the walls. She chose a pair her size, clambered into them and passed through a swinging door into a moderate-sized room with smooth white walls and ceiling. Curled blue air-lines hung down the centre and around the sides of the room. She plugged in the regulator and cool, dry air immediately flooded into her suit, pressurizing it with a roar, momentarily blocking out the chatter. Lining walls to the left and right were various-sized freezers, some opened, presently used by personnel carrying and storing laboratory and experimental materials. Did these freezers hold a super virus? The Koreans using them seemed very casual and somewhat less than security-minded, so possibly not. Since entering Level 2, she had yet to encounter a single guard.
Grace moved to the end of the room and turned left into a much smaller open area, which led into a long gallery lined with four glass-fronted compartments down one side. Several personnel in space suits were looking through the glass panels; she quietly mingled in and slowly made her way down the gallery.
In the first compartment, two men lay under subdued light on beds at the rear wearing only trousers. They were unmarked and appeared to be asleep. In the next, a lightly clothed woman and child cowered in one corner, their exposed flesh partly covered in waxy red blotches; large boils lined the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands. In the third compartment, a man lay naked on a central bed under a bright light, body studded from head to toes in small, bubble-like, dry blisters with hardly a gap between, some beginning to rupture and leak iridescent pus about his face and extremities. When she reached the last, Grace gasped in horror; for curled up in a foetal position on the bare concrete floor in the middle of the compartment were two naked human forms, both totally shrouded in a mass of blackened pus and scabs, skin almost stripped away from the bodies. Their eyes were severely bloodshot, intense and they stared pleadingly at the glass. Grace could not help but feel sickened and appalled at the plight of these two forms; their pain must have been beyond any that a human being could be expected to endure. From her experiments with monkeys, she could see these two unfortunate people were in the terminal stages of what appeared to be the smallpox virus as it was allowed to take its natural course without medication of any kind. She suspected these poor individuals in the four compartments were displaying the effects of the vaccine at varying dosage levels from the splicing of the human IL-4 gene into the virus DNA to create a super strain. She had undertaken similar experiments with monkeys at Porton, administering different dosage amounts of a trial vaccine simultaneously to several and testing the effect over a set period of time. If so, she guessed the two men in the first compartment had received the maximum dosage of a successful vaccine to have remained unscathed like they were and those in the fourth had received nothing at all. From the chatter she was picking up through the communication system her suspicions were soon confirmed. It took her a moment or two to recover from the shock at discovering that the North Koreans had actually created a super variola and possibly a successful vaccine to go with it. There had to be a vaccine. Almost overwhelmed by the horror of what she encountered and steeling herself to face the demon, she turned and headed back along the gallery to find the labs. The scientist in her was determined to find out how they had devised such a monster strain, then after that, to discover where the vaccine was kept.
Returning to the freezer area, Grace followed a group of personnel pushing equipment trolleys down another corridor, which she hoped would lead to a laboratory. She guessed right and entered a bright, white-tiled, rectangular room some sixty-feet long by forty wide, full of space-suited people hunched over workstations on the end of air-hoses hanging from the ceiling. Through an opening at the far end, she could see glass-fronted cages housing naked humans. This definitely was a lab of some significance. If the super strain was to be found, it must surely be found here.
Adrenaline pumping, Grace moved to one of the few empty workstations trying hard to appear as inconspicuous as possible. She pulled down an air-hose and plugged it into her regulator. She set about checking the workstation equipment and could tell straightaway it was configured for experimenting with the variola virus. She glanced sideways at the scientists working either side, her experienced eye telling her they were engaged in variola major testing. Grace prayed that the workstation was not designated to a specific person. So far she had remained unchallenged and could not believe the casualness of the security, but was thankful at the lack thereof.
Her luck held. Not long after setting up the equipment, a suited technician pushing a stainless-steel trolley stopped beside Grace, looked at her and waited. On the trolley were two plastic racks: a blue rack holding several vials of white liquid and a red rack, immersed in water, holding twelve vials of pinkish, opalescent liquid, which Grace immediately recognized as melted smallpox seed. Could it be the super virus? She trembled at the thought, curbing her fear. The vials in water kept the contents at 37 degrees centigrade after removal from a liquid nitrogen bed in a home freezer. Grace guessed the technician expected her to help herself to the vials and she did so with extreme care. She guessed again that she was expected to conduct experiments with the contents like the rest of the occupants alongside her and at the other workstations. However, her experiment would have only one aim: to determine exactly what each of the vials contained. Taking a vial from each rack and placing them in the holder alongside the electron microscope, she found herself wondering what strain the smallpox vial held: Harper, India-1, Bangladesh, Aralsk or Rahima? Or perhaps even some other unknown variola major? All, however, represented the most deadly of strains known to mankind, but an IL-4 smallpox combination would be the deadliest of them all.
Dr Grace Seymour opened the smallpox vial, held it up to the light and tipped it gently. She then stared at the variola major to ensure it had fully melted. A sense of purpose coupled with professional calmness now overcame her nervousness as she reached for a pipette, removed some of the liquid and dribbled it into a Petri dish. She then placed the dish under the electron microscope.
Peering into the scope, she examined the colour image. Instantly her expert eye recognized a genetically engineered super virus swimming before her. She examined closely the recombinant virus’s familiar DNA double-helix structure, wrapped in a membrane of grey, with shades of blue and pink along its edges. But what made the difference was the Interleukin-4 gene that she could see had been successfully spliced to the upper nucleotides, creating an extra layer of membrane, which she determined made it resistant to all known vaccines.
Staggered by what she was seeing, Grace reached for the other vial, put some into a dish and placed it under the microscope. What she viewed floating in the liquid appeared to resemble unfamiliar bacterial cells with small rings of extra plasmids, or DNA, dotted within each of the cell structures. The DNA strands were mixed in with large amounts of cytokine molecules. To Grace this presented nothing special, but she would need time she didn’t have to determine the significance of the mix. She decided there was nothing to lose by adding the liquid to the super virus dish to see what happened. This she did and minutes later was absolutely stunned. She watched the white liquid rapidly devour the super virus until none of the variola remained in the dish. To have undeniable proof of what she and many other virologists around the world had been striving for rocked Grace to the very core. How can this be? How can a seemingly simple combination of bacterial cells and cytokines provide such a powerful antidote? Where the hell did those bacterial cells come from anyway? She had no time to speculate now; her mind raced. She had to find out where this vaccine was stored, grab what she could and then get the hell out of this place as fast as her legs would carry her.