Kismet

by Watts Martin

  “That,” the technician sighs, turning to look at the wolf as well, “is a variant on toxic shock syndrome, which is so rare now most doctors won’t ever encounter it outside training sessions. You can’t treat toxic shock effectively until you remove the source of the infection, but as long as the Q200 is still operational in a patient’s system the source can’t be removed. The countermeasure variant finds the Q200 and, with any luck, shuts it off so conventional treatments start working.” She looks to Allen again. “I trust you are treating all her fluids as transmission vectors.”

  Allen nods.

  “With any luck?”

  She looks back to Gail, pursing her lips. “This is our first field test.” She turns to Allen. “You have organ-printing facilities here?”

  It takes a moment for Gail to process that. Sky’s going to need new organs? God, she’s on dialysis, they said. By the time her ears fold down, Doctor Allen’s already answering. “Yes, of course.” She sounds offended at the question.

  “Not every clinic I’ve been to has them on-site. Are we ready?”

  Doctor Allen nods. She puts on gloves as well, then takes one of the vials and inserts it into one of the machines by Sky’s bedside at about eye level. The machine beeps, its display changing subtly as the—what was that stupid name? Kinetitox—flows into the saline solution being steadily dripped into the wolf’s vein.

  The woman moves to another monitor. Allen joins her. “How fast will we see a response?”

  “It should be within a minute.”

  Silence falls, the background noise of soft clicks and whispering fans moving to the foreground.

  After a minute passes the man frowns and changes some of the displays he’s looking at. No one says anything.

  The tigress breaks the silence after another minute. “I’m not seeing any change.”

  Gail clenches her teeth.

  The woman sighs. “Give her another vial.”

  It’s clear from Allen’s expression she’s not pleased with that advice, but when she turns to the rat her voice is soft, sympathetic. “There’s nothing you can do for her staying here. I’ll give you an update as soon as I have anything to tell you.”

  Deep breath. Nod. She makes it out of the hallway and back to the waiting room without feeling like she’s going to hurl, at least.

  Ansel’s awake now. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” She slumps down by him.

  “How is she?”

  “They’re giving her a countermeasure, but…” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t look like it’s working.”

  He sighs, patting her shoulder again. “She’s strong.”

  “I don’t know if that’s enough.” She rubs her eyes. “I’m going to go back down to the cafeteria again for some coffee.”

  “Do you want any company?”

  “Sure.”

  When they get there, though, Gail finds Jack standing by a corner table, along with the raccoon—Bunten?—she remembers as a Ring official when Sky claimed jurisdiction of the box. There’s another cisform, his black suit and tie making him look more like an Interpol agent than Jack does right now. Or maybe like an undertaker. No, don’t be morbid. But the man’s pale white, balding, with the kind of face that looks permanently fixed in a frown.

  “Ms. Simmons.” The raccoon waves her over.

  The man looks up as Gail approaches, but neither stands nor offers to shake hands.

  “This is Mr. Alfred Sidgemore, Vice President of Internal Affairs—did I get that right?—of Quanta Biotechnics. Mr. Sidgemore, this is Gail Simmons.”

  Her mouth opens, but she can’t get any words to come out. Is he part of the Lantern/Purity group within Quanta? Assuming there is one, under Burke Junior. Assuming it’s not the whole company.

  Sidgemore looks surprised at the introduction. “I see. Yes.” Then he nods to her curtly. “I hope your…sister…is recovering.”

  Gail closes her mouth and swallows. Don’t show any emotion. Okay, her hands are clenching into fists. That’s an emotion. Don’t punch him, though. Too much emotion. “She isn’t. The stuff they’ve brought with them to counter your damn bioweapon isn’t working.”

  “‘Our’ bioweapon? Whatever Keces may have told you—”

  Gail slams both her hands down on the table, making both Bunten and Sidgemore flinch. Coffee sloshes over the rim of a mug. “I would like someone,” she says flatly, “to stop pointing fingers and give me fucking answers.”

  Jack picks up the mug. “Gail, maybe you’re a little too close to this to—”

  “Shut up.”

  Jack frowns at her, moving away from the table.

  “Ms. Simmons, as of this morning we can still account for every milligram of Q200 we’ve produced. Our research has diverged from the Keces lines, but the countermeasures are still fundamentally keyed to specific production runs. Either you reverse engineer them from a sample, or you make the countermeasure at the same time you produce the weapon.”

  She closes her eyes. “The Keces medical tech just said a minute ago it was from a very recent run.”

  “I don't doubt them. But it wasn't ours.”

  Gail clenches her fists hard enough to hurt. “You’re claiming it’s Keces’s version, but their own fucking antidote doesn’t work?”

  He spreads his hands.

  She laughs bitterly, just once; it threatens to become a sob. If Nakimura lives through this, she’s going to kill him.

  Ansel had been standing silently, almost motionless, this whole time, but he clears his throat. “I don’t understand why Purity didn’t just take your copies of Kali, since they’re being run by one of your VPs. Is the Keces variant that much better?”

  “They would say so, we would disagree.” Sidgemore sighs. “But there might be a more practical reason to target them. Mr. Burke, Junior, has been under suspicion of corporate espionage for nearly a year, along with several of his associates. We’ve kept the investigation secret, but we’ve tightened both our data and physical security considerably since it started. River-based corporations like Keces are comparatively lax.”

  Ansel grunts. “And it might also deflect suspicion from him, at least for a short while, if attacks are using Keces’s designs.”

  “Mara’s Blood.” Gail looks away, then back at Sidgemore. “How can you have been investigating him for a year without doing anything? He can’t be acting alone, can he? How many people sympathetic to to Purity are in your company?”

  “Not many. But some.” He falls silent a few long seconds, then speaks softly. “I knew Mr. Burke—Senior—when he still worked at the company. The values he instilled in Quanta, his uncompromising standards, have been invaluable. We’re much larger as a defense contractor than we ever were focusing on the aesthetic transformation market.” He shakes his head. “But he became increasingly…”

  “Reactionary?” Ansel suggests.

  “Obsessed. He encouraged our direct corporate support of the Lantern Foundation, but as they started to take increasingly strident stances against all biomodifications, the board began to balk. When we lost a very large military contract due to concerns over our long-term commitment, we had to make a sufficiently public severance with Burke.”

  “But you still left his son as a goddamn executive?”

  “It was a calculated choice. Some shareholders signaled they preferred we keep a connection with the family, and until recently, there’d been little evidence that Burke Junior shared his father’s ideology.”

  “There’s only one good reason to be going through all this trouble to get this thing to Earth. He doesn’t just want to stop Keces from having Shakti or a quick antidote to Kali. He wants to produce Kali there.”

  “I can’t say one way or another, Ms. Simmons. My concern has been with what they do within the company.”

  “They won’t make it to Earth.” Bunten sounds reassuringly firm. “We’ll be monitoring the passengers very closely on ships bound for the inner system and the seasonal lau
nch window for those trips is closing in only three weeks.”

  “So we’re supposed to just wait and hope?”

  Sidgemore purses his lips. “If I were you, I would press your contacts at Keces for more active assistance.”

  The man has a point. She spins around and heads back to Sky’s room. She has no idea where Jack’s gone. Hopefully she didn’t piss him off too much.

  The scene hasn’t changed, except that Allen and the two technicians look more frustrated. “Ms. Simmons,” the tigress says. “I said I’d let you—”

  “Yeah, I remember.” She looks at the woman technician. “This isn’t Quanta’s bioweapon, is it? It’s yours.”

  The two technicians look at one another, then back at her. Then the woman looks at the floor.

  “Look, I don’t care who’s at fault, I just want to figure out how to fix it. Why doesn’t your Kinetitox work?”

  “It doesn’t match this version of the weapon.” The woman looks like she’s close to tears. “Its specific data set was destroyed and the master data set was what was stolen. And this version’s designed to be almost impossible to reverse engineer. It would take months.”

  “That’s the improvement Keces made to the weapon, isn’t it? Making it harder to defend against.” She takes a deep breath. “So what do we do?”

  “We need the master data set,” the man says. “With that we can rekey the Kinetitox we have on hand in a few hours of work. And we can start making new production runs in three or four weeks. Without it…” He trails off.

  Gail runs a hand through her hair. “You need the data set on the databox.”

  The woman nods mutely.

  “How long can you keep Sky alive until we get it back?”

  Allen takes that one. “We can’t say that with any certainty, but the longer she’s in this state, the more likely there is to be irreversible damage.”

  Gail swallows. “So how much time do we have for there to be a good chance of full recovery?”

  “A week, at the outside.”

  Bunten’s plan is to wait for Purity to make a run at Port Panorica and stop them there. Even if that works it’s going to take a week or two. Or more. They might not try to go through the port at all; maybe they’ll find a way to get it onto a cargo ship. Those runs are less frequent, using slow, vast ships that take the better part of a year to make it to Earth orbit. They don’t leave from Panorica, and they might be fiendishly difficult to track. Who knows what connections they’ve made through Lantern? And Bunten can’t control how seriously the PFS will take this, given both the pissing match going on between the agencies and the probable leak on the PFS side.

  Sky can’t wait that long. And the prospect of Purity getting their hands on the unlocked databox is terrifying. Victims will die—or at least be past the point of saving—before they can reverse engineer an effective countermeasure.

  Gail turns to walk out, then pauses. “How much Q200 did they steal? More than this one canister?”

  The man shakes his head. “I don’t know if we can—”

  “Just fucking tell me.”

  “Fifty kilograms,” he says after a second.

  “And how much does it take to do this?” She points at Sky.

  “About twenty milligrams, give or take.”

  She walks back to the cafeteria, where they’re all in animated discussion again, this time about her. Sidgemore’s upset that she “walked in and bulldozed over” his “good faith effort to cooperate with Ring authorities.” He falls abruptly silent when he sees her again.

  “Ansel, check my math. What’s twenty milligrams into fifty kilograms?”

  “Two and a half million,” Ansel answers. “What are you calculating?”

  “The lethal dose of this weapon divided by how much of it they stole.”

  His eyes widen.

  Gail turns to Bunten. “I know you think we’ll be able to get this databox back just by putting the right people in the right place and waiting. But Sky can’t wait, and I don’t think we can, either. We need to find them, on our own, fast.”

  The raccoon asks the obvious question in a simple, plaintive tone. “How?”

  Chapter 22

  Gail wouldn’t have left the hospital if Jack, Ansel and Doctor Allen hadn’t all insisted. Kis tells her she hasn’t missed a call from the bank, so she assumes they lied again, because that’s what banks do. Nobody’s going to be at Kingsolver at this hour; she goes back to Sky’s.

  It seems far too big for one person. She feels small, out of place. This isn’t her home. But it’s familiar from the last few days. It’s familiar from decades ago.

  It smells like her sister.

  That’s not new, but tonight it hits her like ice water. Any totemic would notice it, a light background scent of ownership that no circulation system, no chemical air cleaner can ever remove. They might even comment on it; among them, it’s not a social faux pas to do so. She learned at a very early age that wasn’t true for cisform friends, and you didn’t comment on scents unless they were from a narrow range of Socially Acceptable Smells, like a good dinner or a scented candle or clean laundry.

  Is it ever acceptable for prims to comment on someone’s scent? She should never even think that word let alone say it out loud, but right now, tonight, after all of today, they look primitive in ways that have nothing to do with aesthetics. But all right: totemics can be just as brutal to one another, just as cruel, just as hateful. After all, they’re only human.

  If that stops being strictly true in the future—perhaps the near future—will they find new ways to screw each other over? As they learn which species have dominant genetic traits, they could invent hundreds of petty reasons not to trust one another.

  Sometime past midnight Gail stretches out on the couch she’s been sleeping on, resting her head on the pillow and staring at the ceiling. On Kismet she can extend the cockpit projection back to the cabin, making the ceiling look like glass so you can sleep under the light of a million stars, thousands of constellations. When this is all over, she’ll take Sky out on the ship to do that, if she wants. It seems like something she’d like. It seems like something Gail should have offered to do years ago.

  She doesn’t expect to be able to fall asleep, but at some point exhaustion trumps worry. She can only be sure she slept because the clock suddenly reads 5:38.

  Years ago someone told her that if you fall asleep thinking about a problem you’ll wake up with a solution, because your dreaming mind will have solved it for you. She’s tried it before and concluded it was just a charming lie. If it was true, she’d have woken up with an answer to Bunten’s question: how. Right? That’s what she fell asleep thinking about it, wasn’t it?

  Shaking her head, she heads into the bathroom, stripping out of the clothes she didn’t bother to take off when she collapsed last night and stepping into the shower stall. A deep clean will take longer, but she feels grungy. She taps it in and stands back, closing her eyes. After a soft, inappropriately cheerful musical chime, the blowers roar on, dusting a cloud of powder over her. It quickly settles into her fur and disperses, spreading down to the roots, to the skin, and working its way around her body ticklishly. When she squirms too much the shower chimes more discordantly: hold still.

  The seventy-five seconds for the cleaning seems interminable, but by the time the next chime sounds the powder has fallen off her in oily grey-brown clumps. It takes the last bits of now-unneeded bandage with it, save for some remaining goo on her tail. The fans switch on again, blowing harder, vents moving up and down to knock any inert cleaning agents off. A third pass at a light air volume spritzes lightly scented dry conditioner. She can feel the dispersing nanobots in it, too, running across her fur and down off her body. Another air-only pass and she’s finished.

  Okay, that’s a better shower than what Kismet has on board. She thinks it’s better than the inn’s shower was—unless she missed it, that one didn’t have the conditioning pass. She heads into the
kitchen and punches what she hopes are the right buttons to get a cup of coffee.

  So. Get the databox.

  Problem: they don’t know where it is.

  Problem: even if they did know where it was, the RJC isn’t set up to do paramilitary strike teams. The PFS might be, but they’re still the most likely source of the leak that tipped off the pirates, so they can’t be trusted. And she can’t afford to hire an outside group.

  The coffee cup’s printed and full. She picks it up, takes a sip, starts pacing.

  Solution: something that doesn’t involve brute force.

  So are you still running cons?

  A con job. Clever, sure. But she doesn’t have anything more valuable to trade than the databox, and she doesn’t have a way to get in touch—

  Wait. She still has Nelson’s contact information. It could be, probably is, a throwaway drop, maybe not even in service anymore. And he’d have no reason to answer if she called, anyway.

  But he might if someone else called, someone who wouldn’t immediately be suspect. Someone who could convince them…convince them of what? Back to the nothing-more-valuable problem. From what she can see, Lantern wants absolutely nothing more than getting that databox to Earth.

  They have to have a plan for that already, right? But if she’d gotten it for them, the plan would have been shipping it out on today’s cruise to Earth, she bets, and that’s a no-go now. If their plan avoids going through Port Panorica, it’s convoluted and probably achingly slow. It’s not what they wanted.

  So maybe she can offer them fast, safe passage. Who could convincingly give them that? Obviously, only someone cisform. Jack? No, they know he’s in bed with the mongrels. Who’s that leave? Taylor’s out.

  Mara’s Blood, how many other cisform people does she even know? She’s friendly with dozens, but she doesn’t know one she could drag into something this dangerous. Not that it’s good form to be dragging friends into danger anyway.

  She takes another sip of coffee, and bites her lip hard enough to hurt. Actually, what does Lantern really know about Jack? Nelson saw him arrest her, knows he’s been working with the PFS. But he also knows Jack came here with her and Ansel. He might know Jack kept investigating this even after Interpol tried him off the case, although he might think Jack was here as part of that investigation. He definitely knows Interpol suspended him for it after he got to New Coyoacán.