by David Poyer
The Marines run into another block five kilometers on, at a pinch in the valley. This takes calling in close air to growl off several hundred rounds of 20mm into pockets of resistance. Followed by a salvo of tank shells, this allows them to ram through again.
The valley opens. The road descends, becomes four lanes of concrete. The armor leaps ahead, their riders gripping tight as baby possums on a mother’s belly. Shaken off, they’d be smashed into paste by the vehicles behind.
Ahead, skyscrapers grow.
* * *
AS dusk creeps closer they grind into the outskirts of a city. Smoke bleeds into the sky ahead. At the far end of the highway a red and white tower lifts above a long building of the same red brick and white stucco. Ffoulk yells into the mike, and the lead tank charges for it. The streets are eerily empty, and Hector wonders where the residents have gone. To death camps, like the one he and Patterson came across?
The tank smashes through a low wall, sending blocks of granite flying, and brakes to a squealing, rocking halt in front of the building.
It’s been burned, gutted by fire and shells. Black eyebrows of smoke stain the white stone above the windows. Palm trees lie like pick-up sticks. Chunks have been blown out of the portico, leaving windrows of shattered brick and plaster. No one’s around. “Dismount,” Ffoulk yells, and they spill off and form a cordon, setting up machine gun posts in front of the building. “Come with me,” she snaps at Hector and Patterson, and makes for the entrance.
The empty, echoing hallways are sooty with smoke and carpeted with thousands of cartridge casings. Blood splotches the walls. Used bandages litter the floor of an abandoned aid station. They jog after Ffoulk until she finds a stair leading up. This seems less damaged than the front of the building, though the stench of powder’s still thick and broken glass from the shattered windows grates under their boots. They cover each other as they ascend.
Flight after flight … at the sixth landing Hector staggers. His head swims. He can barely drag one boot up after the other. Despite the break at the aid station, weeks of fatigue and terror are catching up. He centers his carbine’s optical sight on Patterson’s back. With an effort, grimacing, he manages to slide his finger off the trigger.
At the eighth flight he halts and bends over, trying to breathe. His legs shake. Isn’t he supposed to be in better shape than this? But it’s not his body that’s going. It’s his head. For an endless moment he’s filled with utter terror. But an instant later he can’t feel anything at all. Not fear, not dread. Nor any concern for his fellow marines.
Something tickles his throat … trickles down inside his blouse … he gropes a hand into his battle dress … tiny hard seed-shapes slip through his fingers. Falling like drops of hardened blood. Small deep red plastic spheres, little rubies.
Mirielle’s rosary. The string’s rotted, broken. “No,” he whispers, and bends, grabbing uselessly for the beads as they fall and bounce crazily. “Fuck. Fuck,” he mutters as they scatter and roll away, eluding his stiffened fingers in the tactical gloves, hopping like escaping crickets down the stairwell.
“Ramos!” Ffoulk, leaning over the rail above him, stares down.
He straightens from the rolling beads. “Guarding your rear,” he mutters, then can’t help emitting a short bark of laughter. What would Whipkey have said? It would take a whole squad to man that perimeter. Yeah, that’s what Troy would’ve said.
Troy Whipkey. From South Florida. Killed on Itbayat Island by an antipersonnel drone.
He rubs his face against the rough plaster of the stairwell, relishing the pain as his skin abrades. Images and feelings jumble in his brain. A kaleidoscope of broken glass. Broken memories. Kisses from dead lips. Orietta. Clay. Whipkey. Bleckford—
“Staff Sar’n’t! Get the fuck up here!”
He straightens, and shoves off the wall. Stands panting, staring down from a window. To where a second file of armor is appearing at the far end of the avenue. One of the Marine Abramses creeps out from a side street. The turret swings. Steadies.
With a terrific bang and a streak of light like a meteor’s an antitank round goes out. It beams down the street and the lead incoming tank explodes. From the far side of the avenue other dazzling streaks lash out, accompanied by terrific bangs.
Pei is arriving, ahead of schedule.
“Ramos!” Above, Ffoulk is screaming. He flinches, and double-times up the stairs.
* * *
THE last flight, and they emerge, out in the open now, here at the top of the tower. The view is dizzying. They’re way up here. The wind feels good, though. The lieutenant’s pulling something from her pack. Shaking it out. It’s red and white. And blue too. He should recognize what it is, but doesn’t. The colors are pretty, though. It’s bright, and clean, and new.
Ffoulk is clambering up onto a ledge. Above it stands a flagpole. A red cloth streams from it in the wind. The diminutive officer gropes for it, but her hands fall short. “Fuck,” she mutters, then turns. “Ramos, can you reach this? Get up here. Pull this fucking rag down.”
“You want that down, Lieutenant?”
“What I just said, isn’t it? You still fucked up, Ramos?”
“I—”
“Never mind. Just—yeah. Do it. Haul it down.”
He steps up on the ledge, reaches, and snags the downhaul. It’s lashed with some complicated knot that takes some clumsy picking at to loosen. But at last the flag descends, slides down, and falls over him in folds of scarlet and yellow. As he fights free Ffoulk grabs the tattered cloth, stuffs it into her pack, and hands him the red and white and blue one.
“Hoist that,” she snaps.
Then makes a strange ejaculation, a puff of meaningless sound, as her head whips round. She bends at the waist, then collapses. Past her he glimpses Patterson, gone pale under the dirt, aiming her phone at them.
Belatedly he realizes what’s happened. At the same moment Patterson yells, “Sniper! Get down!”
“I gotta hoist this,” he yells back, struggling with the colored cloth, looking for some way to attach the snap hooks on the halyard. His eyes work, but his brain doesn’t engage. He stares down stupidly at the bundle in his hands.
There—a brass ring. He snaps the head onto the downhaul as a second bullet goes whack into the concrete beside him, blasting out a chunk and covering his arm with gray powder. Whatever they’re shooting, it’s heavy caliber. He can’t imagine where they’re firing from. Unless it’s that blue skyscraper over there, but that’s nearly a mile away. “Somebody’s fucking good,” he mutters, groping to attach the foot of the flag. He sways on the ledge and barely manages to pull himself back vertical with a savage yank on the halyard. If he loses it up here, it’s got to be two hundred feet down to the pavement. More shattering blasts from below tells him the tanks are still fighting it out. A machine gun stutters. Then others, but the explosions seem faint and faraway from up here.
The snap shackle clicks home. He pulls the flag free with one arm, hanging on to the pole with the other. He glimpses Patterson in the doorway, still aiming her phone. Another bullet snaps past, just missing the pole, and a hole magically appears in the flag. He flaps it free of the halyard and drops to the terrace, taking in on the downhaul, boots planted on either side of Ffoulk’s body, which is still convulsing.
The flag rises, unfurling as it catches the wind. He crouches as if pummeled by a downpour, taking in the line hand over hand, until the flag jams in the sheaves at the top and streams out over the city below, bright and lively in the wind. The red stripes lick like flames against the darkening sky. He ties it off with a clumsy knot, then bends to drag the lieutenant into the doorway with Patterson.
“I sent it,” the corporal yells over the renewed clatter of fire. She holds up her phone.
“Sent what?… never mind. She’s hurt. Need a medic. Aid station.” His knees are shaking so bad he can’t stand. So he kneels beside Ffoulk, patting the slack face. The officer’s eyes stare blankly u
p at the lintel. He fumbles for a field dressing. Stuffs it into the back of her skull. There’s plenty of room.
Patterson shakes his arm, then whacks his helmet. “Ouch,” he yells. “What the fuck?”
“She’s gone. Sergeant! We got to get outta here. Those tanks are gonna put a shell into this tower any fucking second.”
“We can’t leave her.”
“She’s fucking gone. We’ll come back for the body. Now!”
Reluctantly, settling Ffoulk’s head gently to rest on her pack, he lets Patterson pull him back into the stairwell. A tremendous blast rocks the tower. Fire rattles outside, building to the crescendo of a major battle. Mingled with it is the roar of jets. The hoglike silhouette of a CAS drone flashes past, level with the window. The Brrrrrr of its Gatling vibrates the air. A green comet lashes past the drone, so fast the eye can’t follow. Patterson keeps pulling on his sleeve, towing him down the steps. He shakes his head, muttering. “Not right. Should’a brought her along,” he grunts, lurching into the wall. “Leave nobody behind.”
“You’re crazy fucked, Sergeant. Just keep going.”
“Just keep going. Just keep going.”
“Now you got it. Watch that turn. Can you cover me at the landing? Hector! Can you cover me?”
“Let fucking go of me … gotta take a shit…”
“When we get down. You got me? Ramos, you fucking asshole, you covering me? Jesus!”
“Never mind … I got you. Got you.” His eyes are burning. For some reason, all of a sudden he’s crying. Though he still doesn’t feel anything except the hot tears on his cheeks.
Clumsily unslinging his carbine with numb, insensate fingers, he angles for a shot downward.
Staggering down together, covering each other at the corners, slowly and deliberately, they descend the staircase.
5
Seattle
THE young, dark-haired woman ran rapidly down the stairwell, grinning. The numbers worked. They worked!
It wasn’t a clinical trial, of course, with a control group and actual human beings. Only virtual, run through millions of iterations by Archipelago’s deep medical AI.
But so far, everything Asklepios had predicted to happen in the human body, had happened.
She stopped at the landing, unable to wait, and texted the head of her research team.
Asky confirms 80% effectiveness in gen pop, Dr. Nan Lenson texted. Might just have effective agent. On way down 2 u.
* * *
THE influenza ravaging first Asia and now Africa was a virus, of course. A subtype of a common avian flu. But viruses “drifted.” Shuffled the decks, reassorting segments promiscuously from other strains they encountered.
And once or twice a century, you got something devastating.
“Central Flower” had emerged in Asia two years before. No one knew from where, but it had picked up a deadly gene. The CDC infectious disease team in Vietnam had estimated a 40 percent mortality rate.
Vietnamese researchers had isolated the virus, named it, and forwarded samples. The new strain produced a protein that shut down the normal immune response. Combined with the privations of wartime—reduced nutrition, long work hours, and the psychosomatic distress of worry and fear—the result could be cataclysmic.
As Nan Lenson had told her father, Dan, months before, it might actually be good that the world was at war. The lack of travel seemed to have slowed its spread. But that barrier wouldn’t stop it long.
The world faced another pandemic. Like the Spanish Flu in 1918. The CDC alert level stood at Phase Six, the highest level of the disease alert system.
Glaxo and Merck had produced candidates for a monovalent live attenuated vaccine. Unfortunately, the Glaxo version hadn’t panned out, and the Merck vaccine generated higher than acceptable rates of Guillain-Barré Syndrome in older recipients.
A year before, Dr. Anton Lukajs, head of Archipelago’s research team, had assigned Nan to research a family of advanced antivirals. They inhibited the neuraminidase protein that locked into the healthy cell and let a virus inject its RNA. She’d used reverse genetics to investigate the interactions that made the virus so dangerous. When she’d characterized the segments, she found a unique carboxyl terminus. Mapping that structure out on the molecular level had eventually elucidated how it evaded immunity and hijacked healthy cells.
Nan had worked with Dr. Jack Jhingan, Asklepios’s acolyte, to model the interactions in the body, trying to find or create a compound to block that terminus. To throw a monkey wrench into how it reproduced inside the cell. Or, alternatively, make it visible again to the immune response, so it didn’t get inside at all.
Under Nan’s direction, they’d tested the antivirals on ferrets, one of the few animals other than humans susceptible to influenza, isolating the subjects in the Army Level Five containment site at Fort Detrick. But without much success, and she’d concluded that the animals weren’t really homologous to humans in their reactions or transmission rates.
Every approach had hit a dead end. And the virus continued to spread.
Then Asklepios had integrated a deep neural network that modeled and predicted large-molecule interactions with the body. And Nan had asked it a simple question. Simple to ask, but unimaginably complex in what it demanded of the program.
What would be the formulation of a molecule that would block the linking action of the carboxyl group of Central Flower’s neuraminidase protein, while demonstrating low toxicity, high activity, high solubility, and minimal risk to patients?
After twelve hours of dedicated thought, the AI had just delivered a hit.
* * *
DR. Lukajs was in his office. One wall, all glass, overlooked the central mall. Elms and maples were scattered across green lawns dotted with pergolas, pathways, and ponds large enough to pass for small lakes. The central mall was encircled by the immense blue-glass-and-metal ring of the Archipelago campus. Four stories, two square miles, of the most advanced science in the world.
“It’s derived from Cytoxan,” she told Lukajs, who stood with arms crossed, looking wearily skeptical as usual, before a screen. Biochemists seldom used test tubes these days. The discipline was as dependent on computers as every other science now.
The lead virologist was emaciated, with a wispy fringe of white hair and brown age speckles like spilled coffee dotting his hands. After barely surviving radical prostate surgery, he moved with the tentative fragility of the very old. He frequently smelled of urine. A living meme of the classic nerd, he wore a white lab coat with a pocket protector, a narrow black tie, black oxfords, and plastic-rimmed glasses. Lukajs was Albanian. He’d grown up under Communism, studied in Moscow, and hated working for private industry. “Criminal profiteers,” he called them. Archipelago he tolerated, since it was a congressionally chartered corporation, like the Red Cross or the NIH. In some ways he was a dinosaur. But still, he had a frighteningly acute intellect.
“Cyclophosphamide? Already I don’t like it.” He waggled fingers dismissively. “An alkylating nitrogen mustard antineoplastic. Activates in the liver to form aldophosphamide. Side effects: hair loss, sterility, birth defects, mutations, cancer! This is what you bring me to cure Chinese flu?”
She pushed her notebook into his hands. On its screen a colorful, immensely complicated molecule rotated slowly in a 3-D display. “It’s not cyclophosphamide. It’s an isoelectronic structural analog. I screened the database. It’s not in the literature.”
Grumbling, the lead virologist carried the computer to a slanted table, adjusted the screen, and studied it. The visual resembled an exploding star system seen by the Hubble telescope, with its color-coded strands of sugars, proteins, chains of atoms. He cleared his throat and leaned closer. Tapped the surface to stop the rotation. Then spread his fingers to zoom in on one branch of the molecule. “This is a transition state analog.”
“I believe so, Doctor.” Such an analog resembled the transition state of a substrate molecule in an enzyme-cat
alyzed chemical reaction. And the human cell responded to viral infection by releasing enzymes. “Of course, that’s just the initial candidate compound. We can modify it to improve recognition and binding geometries.”
He studied it for several more seconds in silence. “Hmm. Aah … I think I see … clever. The conventional approach, to sensitize the immune system to surface proteins. But this lets virus attach to the plasma membrane. Hemagglutinin to sialic acid.”
“But inhibits the cell’s response,” she pointed out.
Lukajs mused on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “The virion … attaches. Injects mRNA. Yes. But this inhibits the enzyme it uses to translate into protein. No enzyme activity, no protein, no genome replication.” He squinted. “But what happens to the RNA then? It is still inside, yes?”
Nan said, “The cell’s defenses destroy it and MHC class I pushes the debris out onto the cell surface.”
Lukajs milked his tie, grimacing. “The artificial mind says this, yes? So clever it is. But it doesn’t think, what happens next? Cytotoxic T tags cell as infected with a toxic mediator and kills it. So cell still dies, in the end.”
She nodded. “But no daughter viruses are replicated. Once the initial viral load’s exhausted, the infectious process ends.”
He glanced sharply at her. “Database search?”
“Came up empty.”
“Toxicity?”
“Worrying, but we could pretreat with amifostine. Reduce the hematologic damage, but still get the antiviral efficacy.” She caught his frown before he could object. “Or maybe not amifostine. Something like it, though. We could run virtual trials on pharmacophores. Like I said, to bump up the binding geometries. Hundreds of them. Or thousands! The system’s that fast.”
“It might be worth trying,” the old man said grudgingly. But she’d watched a light grow in his eyes as he examined the molecule. Grasped what the drug might be trying to do.
