Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  His computer beeped at him to say it was done collating his data, reminding him that he’d been working on some of those things when Amy had barged in. Amy! What had she been about? He typed commands into his keyboard to call up the raw data in a plotted form that was easy to understand. She’d never jumped him like that before. Why now? Was she jealous of Carmen? And what was she talking about right before she left?

  The plotted data popped on his screen. He reached up, slid some spreadsheets aside, and pressed a button for another format. What the hell was that? He was seeing some astonishing readings. His fingers went back to the keyboard, flying over the keys. He needed to go back to the raw data, to verify it. Rows and columns appeared on his screen and he scrolled through them carefully. Everything checked out.

  He went to the video feed the little robots had sent back. It was scratchy, and not the best quality. But he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. They’d found it. His little bots had found the lunar holy grail. It was right there, in the same deep crater he’d used as a shelter for him and Carmen.

  Water ice. And not just a little bit, either. It looked like there was a damned glacier at the bottom of that crater. Tons of ice. Enough to supply that small city Carmen had been joking about. Water was one of the only resources they had never had enough of out there, and it was something they needed for anything they wanted to do. But now, they had more water ice that he’d dared dream existed here – and this was just from one lucky crater! Where there was one, there were bound to be others, too.

  Life on the moon was about to change in a huge way. He jumped up from his seat, excited. He ought to go tell someone. The whole team should know – this was huge! This was life changing for all of them.

  Patrick thought of running off to tell Carmen. She’d love to hear about it – probably be as excited as he was. The city – her idea – might happen after all. Imagine this place with hundreds of people here. Or maybe they’d leave this place intact, and build a new site closer to the crater with the water. Hard to say which would work better. They’d need to do feasibility studies, and see if the ice was really pure all the way through, and – lots of work.

  Only fair to tell everyone at once. They all had a stake in this. He tapped his earpiece. “Control, this is Patrick.”

  “Control here,” came the reply.

  “Who’s this?” Patrick asked.

  “Jacob, sir. What’s up?”

  One of the new guys, Patrick recalled. The one who’d been hurt when he and Carmen went outside to fix the electricity. “Jacob, can you retransmit for me? I want to go out over the PA system to everyone in the base.”

  “Got it, sir. You’re live.”

  Patrick took a deep breath. This might be one of the most important things he was ever able to announce. He stood up. Somehow, that seemed appropriate.

  “Base, this is Pat. I’m thrilled to announce that one of the research outposts has found a crater with copious water ice. We’ll need to do physical inspection to be sure of the amount, but preliminary data says we’re looking at tens of thousands of tons of the stuff. Staff leaders meet in the conference room in one hour for a strategy meeting. I’ll get the kitchen to bring up coffee. This is probably going to be a doozy of a meeting.”

  He took another breath, and then went on. “To all of you – congratulations! This is a defining moment in our mission here. I want to thank each of you for all the work that has led to our success.”

  Patrick clicked off his radio. His door was still open, and through it he could hear the reaction to his words. The shouts, the whoops, the clapping – all made it down the hall to his office just fine. He sat back down in his chair, feeling more satisfied than he had in a long while.

  Now to inform Earth. He wasn’t sure what they’d recommend. There were plans in place for what to do when they found ice. They’d known all along that they would some water ice here. But he didn’t think anyone had guessed there would be so much, so close together and easy to extract. This was going to turn some heads on Earth, for sure. He got to work typing his report.

  Chapter 9

  CARMEN WAS exhausted. First the excitement of earlier in the Hopper – had it really only been this morning? Since getting back to the lab, there’d been nonstop effort. Her eyes burned from looking at things under a microscope. But the job was done. The rats had been inoculated. Now they had to wait five days, to see if the vaccine worked. The animals needed time to build antibodies against the virus.

  A vaccine was only half of the solution, though. Ideally, they needed a cure as well. That was proving more than challenging. So far, nothing was stopping the virus. None of the normal antiviral drugs were having any effect at all. It didn’t make sense to her. They’d tested a broad range of drugs on the virus, but it shrugged off everything they hit it with. Something ought to have at least some effect on the damned thing!

  She was trying a different tactic, now. Working a relatively quiet corner of the lab, she was using a fairly simple set of tests to break down the virus into its component parts. That had been done before, of course. But she was going to go a step further. Once the analysis was complete, she’d have the entire structure of the virus and its DNA genome mapped. She could then compare both to the database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information – which had similar data on thousands of known viruses.

  If she knew what viruses this bug was most like, then she would have a better shot at figuring out which course of treatment might be most effective. It seemed like a logical step. She was surprised no one else had tried it yet, in fact. The virus had been sequenced a few times already. But no one had published a paper discussing which other viral structures it was similar to.

  The thing had to have come from somewhere. Once she knew where, then she was pretty sure she could figure out how to kill it.

  “That’s a dead end,” her father said.

  She looked up from her work and glanced over her shoulder. He was standing there, watching her progress. How long had he been there?

  “Why?” she asked. “It seems the obvious thing to do.”

  “And it’s been done,” her father replied. “But there were…problems.”

  He had Carmen’s entire attention now. She turned her chair around to face him. “What sort of problems?”

  “Here,” he said. “This is a classified document I am sending you, Carmen.” He tapped the tablet in his hand a few times.

  She waved her hands around the room. “Half of what we’re working on here is classified information.”

  “Not like this. It’s the virus. It’s why the problem has been so hard to solve.”

  She frowned at him, but picked up her own tablet to read what he’d sent. The email opened easily enough, and she popped the attached paper open. It was a classified report detailing the same study she’d been trying to do. And the results were more than surprising. Carmen opened her mouth to say something but closed it again as she continued scanning the paper. By the time she was done skimming the text, her jaw had dropped.

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  “That is what I thought when I read it,” her father replied. “Nonetheless, it is true.”

  The team working on the initial viral outbreak had been thorough. They’d done all the right tests, and compared the virus to the database. Initial results had shown it was a new virus, one they’d never seen before. But they’d kept digging. Then they had the idea to test the meteorite samples the Antarctica team brought back with them. And they found their virus, deep in the core of one of the samples.

  Which of course made no sense at all. Ice might harbor a viral sample, but it was unlikely to survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The little fragments of rock and metal that the team had been collecting weren’t likely to have a viral sample embedded in them. It wasn’t impossible – but it was highly improbable.

  But not this rock.

  Carmen studied the diagram. Once they discovered which rock house
d the virus, it had been carefully examined. The meteorite had a hollow core, which was filled with ice. Again, not impossible – but preposterously improbable. The ice held the virus. But it wasn’t just one virus. The little bit of water ice in the middle of the rock was teeming with thousands of viruses. Most of them did absolutely nothing to humans. They didn’t have the right proteins to connect to human cells – or the cells of any other Earth creatures, Carmen was betting.

  But as she flipped through the data, something became immediately obvious.

  “None of the viruses contained in the meteor were related, even a little bit”?

  Her father shook his head. “No. Each one was unique.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “Evolution would indicate that there would at least be some similarities between some of the viruses.”

  “True,” Doctor Rosa replied.

  “If they evolved,” Carmen said.

  “Also true,” her father said, his face a grim mask. “Now you see why this document is classified, and why you have never seen it, and I did not just show it to you.”

  There was no way you could have thousands of completely unique viruses in a random sampling. Some of them would be related, would have shown similar structures. It was impossible. Which meant the only answer was that the viruses in the meteor had not evolved.

  They’d been manufactured. And put inside the rock.

  “We’re sure the rock wasn’t made by some nut on Earth?” she asked.

  “Geology report makes it very clear that the material is extra-terrestrial in origin.”

  Her head whirled. This changed everything. Moving the research to the moon made a lot more sense, all of a sudden. Among the things they’d brought with them was that original rock, complete with its massive pile of engineered viruses. Who knew how many of the others were dangerous, too? Better to put the research someplace where quarantine could be absolutely assured, if anything went wrong.

  The meteor itself was like a cosmic biological weapon. Someone had made all those viruses with as broad a range of possible protein shells as possible. Whatever had manufactured them didn’t know what the target species looked like, so they couldn’t tailor a specific virus. But they created a huge range with the idea that one of them would probably work. At least one of them had, and now people were dying.

  And the virus wasn’t the biggest threat. The biggest threat was whoever had made it.

  “That’s why our work here is so crucial,” her father said softly. “Because the worst is still coming.”

  * * *

  The next morning, all the rats they’d injected with the vaccine were sick. The vaccine hadn’t helped the animals to build immunity. It had actually given them the virus. It was a crushing failure, and Carmen couldn’t help but feel desperate. Her grim mood was shared by the rest of the team as well. Most of them had family and friends on Earth, and anyone back home was in constant danger of becoming infected. The virus was spreading like wildfire, despite all the attempts to quarantine affected areas.

  Her father would have none of it. “Come now,” he said. “We knew the first attempt would likely fail. And we have another batch of samples ready to run initial tests on. Perhaps the vaccine will be in there.”

  A few people attempted half smiles, at that. He shook his head.

  “This is not science. Science is not about hoping for the result. It is about finding the answer. Slowly, methodically, eliminating each wrong answer until the right one is discovered,” he said.

  Carmen stood up. She still didn’t feel as hopeful as her father, but the melancholy mood wasn’t getting them any closer to curing this disease. “The old man’s right, folks. Let’s get the next set of buns in the oven.” She clapped her hands, and the team chuckled at her jibes, then got back to work. She heaved a sigh. The sooner they got the next trials cooking, the better.

  “Old man?” her father said. He cocked an eyebrow. “Buns in the oven?” His tone sounded scandalized, but he was smiling.

  “Yup. And let’s hope one of these isn’t a wrong answer,” she said.

  “Indeed,” he replied.

  Carmen picked up her tablet, going back over her notes. “It’s pretty obvious why the last trial failed,” she said.

  “Reactivation,” he replied.

  She nodded absently, reading over her notes. They’d used an attenuated virus in the rat trial. Basically, they’d tried to “turn off” a batch of live virus, and injected a specific model of turned off virus into the rats. The theory was sound: their immune systems would think the attenuated virus was live, and would mount an immune response, which would then let them fight off the real virus when they were exposed to it later.

  But what had happened was very different. The attenuated virus had performed as expected in their initial tests, but when it was injected into a live host it reactivated. Their vaccine was as lethal as an exposure to the regular virus.

  “I’m looking over the other plausible models for attenuation, dad. But I don’t think any of them are viable. I think they’re all going to reactivate,” Carmen said.

  He settled back into his chair, rubbing his chin with one hand. “That will make a vaccine more difficult.”

  “We might do better looking for a treatment, instead of a vaccine,” she replied. “I’m noticing that the neuraminidase inhibitors had some effect. Not enough to make a difference,” she went on quickly, because it looked like he was about to object. “But it might be the right track.”

  “Give it a shot,” he said. He picked up his tablet and typed a few words. A moment later, a tome appeared on her tablet. “Doctor Jeremy Greene has been working on that method, back on Earth. I’ve sent you his research.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take a look.” She opened the huge document. How much of it had her father read? He had brought so much data with him, so many reports of research by so many doctors and scientists. Carmen knew he’d been pouring over them as much as he could, but every day more information was flooding up from teams on Earth working the problem.

  Carmen had an advantage over Greene and most others working on the problem, though. Her eyes were open now in a way that most of those scientists were not. She was over the shock of her father’s revelation the night before. Now she was simply determined to unravel the mystery. And unlike most of the people working on a solution, she had an advantage. She knew this virus wasn’t natural. It had been engineered. It was a weapon, not the result of nature. The thought still gave her chills.

  But it might be a good thing. In her experience, that meant it was inherently weak. Nature built things to be strong because things that weren’t strong went away. That’s how evolution worked. But strip away evolution, and all you had was the ingenuity of the people – or aliens – doing the making. She would bet on Mother Nature over someone in a lab any day of the week.

  She was convinced these viruses had a weak spot. She just needed to find it.

  Ideally someplace less distracting. The lab was bustling with people getting ready for the next sequence of testing, and it made reading this Dr. Greene’s documentation more difficult than it ought to be.

  “Dad, I’m going to take this back to my room and give it a thorough reading.”

  “That’s fine, Carmen. We’ve got time before this batch of buns come out of the oven,” he replied. Then he went very still. “But Carmen? No trips outside the domes this time, please?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, dad. Not planning on it.”

  Carmen wondered how long he was going to play the protective mother hen. She was betting on forever. The man would be in the ground before he stopped trying to protect her from the world. And oh, god, but she would miss him when he left. She stood up to go, but then had an impulse and walked over to him instead. She leaned over and gave her father a kiss on the cheek.

  “And what did I do to deserve such an honor?” he asked her, smiling broadly.

  “Just you, being you,” she said. “And with th
at, I’m off. Be back in a bit!”

  She stepped brightly from the lab, smiling to herself as she went. It was good to give him a little something nice. He was annoying as all get-out sometimes, but he meant well even when he was being too nosy. And she loved him.

  Chapter 10

  PATRICK READ the email a third time, still not quite believing what he was seeing. Command back on Earth had given him his marching orders. And they were not at all what he’d expected.

  He snapped his fingers, and the screen shut off. He hadn’t misread any of it. But what were they thinking? He had to talk this over with someone. After her odd reactions the other night, Patrick wasn’t as sure about talking to Amy as he once had been. And there weren’t too many other people on the base who he trusted implicitly.

  What about Carmen, though? She was smart, and able to keep her mouth shut when called for. He hadn’t seen her since running into her just outside sick bay yesterday, and it would be nice to see her anyway. Hell, it would be a lot more than nice.

  “Computer, locate Carmen Rosa, please,” he said. They all wore communication units that allowed tracking, but you had to have authorization to get a location. Only supervisor level personnel could do that. He wasn’t abusing that privilege, he told himself. He was just saving time, finding out where she was.

  “Carmen Rosa is in Dome Four, room sixteen,” the computer replied. It popped up a helpful schematic, just in case he didn’t already know the base by heart. Which he did. That was her room. What was she doing there already? It was only just past ten in the morning. He’d have expected she would still be in the lab.

  Still, this made for an easier quiet conversation anyway. He didn’t need to have a dozen people around while he talked about his command issues. He got up and started moving, a smile slowly tugging at his face.

  It would be good to see her again.

  He reached the door and hesitated. If she was in there, was she there for privacy? She might not welcome the intrusion. Maybe she was sleeping. Or working. If she had wanted to see him, she knew how to find him. He wasn’t ever a difficult man to locate.