Out of the thirteen—Annia found herself thinking of them as the Charmmes alleles—shared by Maycee and Johanna-Eunice, Elizabeth-Belle carried seven and Jordan-Kyle four. The really interesting thing was that Jordan-Kyle carried a different four from Elizabeth-Belle's.
Annia rocked back in her chair to think. Clearly, the fatal condition occurred when one of the Charmmes family inherited all thirteen alleles. In fact, she would have to look more closely, but some of the alleles were clearly recessive and would become active only if both parents conveyed the recessive gene—like the blue or yellow variation in human eye color. A dominant trait from one parent would mask the recessive. Also, one of Elizabeth-Belle's alleles had both an inert and an active form with the inert variation rendering the active one inert as well.
None of this would come as news to the Charmmes gene-techs. They would by now have mapped the entire phenotype and tried to tinker it out. The real question was why they had not succeeded. Maycee had said the DVs they had tried had simply shut down, which would be impossible if it weren't, apparently, true.
She still couldn't compile a domestic virus, but she could run simulations. She selected a standard DV designed to correct a common mutation that caused partial color-blindness and altered it to address one of the genes common to Maycee, Johanna-Eunice, and Elizabeth-Belle, who expressed the Q-wave, however weakly, while Jordan-Kyle did not. She queued the simulated run for the next available space in the processor.
Then what could she do? Her equipment was fully occupied. She should go out and try to help what patients she could. She might at least be able to make them more comfortable. What would be the point? Without a cure, without even Maycee and Cho'en, the best she could do would be to sedate the worst cases and let them die undisturbed like the old man in the examination room.
Annia rested her forehead on her palms. After a moment, Honeybear clicked. Was Rhea, its little-girl owner, still alive? It brushed her hair with its proboscis. Annia scrubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes. She sat up, pulled up her file containing everything she knew or could discover about Century Plague and send the data turning before her eyes. Somewhere in there might be a clue to the cure, and if it was there, Annia was going to find it.
#
Tora felt good. Her bruises were healing. Annia had repaired the worst damage. She had not gone out of the camp yet. The Cerise had left, but there were still blue-sash soldiers in the camp. They did not hurt the humans, but Tora did not like to have them there.
Tora was trying to think how she would get rid of the black-uniform enemies infesting her territory outside the fence. She did not have enough soldiers to fight them even if Solante's blue-sash soldiers helped, and Tora did not think the blue-sash soldiers would follow orders well. She had simulations for fighting a superior force. She felt it could be done, but she wanted to discuss it with Mr. Ventnor and her lieutenants.
A runner came to her, picking his way around the bodies of damaged humans littering the camp. "Colonel Miraz?"
"Yes." She did not know the boy-human's name. He had very dark skin and a heavily muscled frame. He had the kind of stillness that made for a good soldier.
"Colonel Miraz, you should see this."
He took her out into the street and showed her. The black-uniforms were leaving. Tora would not have known that from the small groups of three and four that passed the camp at intervals, but the runners had been watching, and they said the police were withdrawing from Murrayville. Only, the black-uniforms did not want humans to realize they were leaving.
The runner said, "They're still stunning anybody who crosses their path, but I think we've got the new pattern figured out."
Why were the black-uniforms leaving? They wanted to keep the disease in Murrayville. That was why they had come. If Tora had captured a ship, she would not withdraw...unless a greater force threatened to retake the ship, and she did not have the resources to hold it. She turned to the runner. "Bring me Liam Tanar. You know him?"
He nodded.
"Bring him to me."
#
"Doctor."
Annia recognized Solante's soldier whose arm she had set after Tora broke it. "I'm busy," she told him.
The man said, "Mr. Solante sent me. He said you'd want to hear what he had to say."
"What did he tell you to say if I don't come?"
"He said to say you and he are on the same side, and that he wants to help you fight the century plague."
Annia felt as if something cold and strong was wrapping her in feathery tendrils. First the DV for the clones, then medical supplies for the infirmary at the camp, now an offer to help her fight century plague. Always, it was something she couldn't refuse, and the price always seemed so small.
Mr. Solante met her in his white-and-pearl atrium. It was clean and cool and silent. The clinic with its death and dirt and smells seemed unreal by comparison. "Ms. Annia. Thank you for coming."
She had forgotten how beautiful he was. He made her feel dirty and under-dressed and overheated. "You knew I had to."
"We have a common cause."
"What are you offering?"
He held out his hand. "Come with me and discuss it in a civilized fashion."
His pretense of gentility annoyed her. "Don't waste my time with games and gestures, Solante. My clinic is full of dying children; my home has been converted into a hospital; my friends are sick, tired and wounded, and I don't have the equipment to help them. I have better things to do than play tea parties."
He said, "Come upstairs to a more comfortable room."
She could follow him toward the lift or leave without finding out what he had to offer. She followed.
He stepped aside to let her in. "How is my daugher?"
The doors closed. "I don't know who you mean."
"My Tora, the clone who isn't a clone anymore."
Annia had heard from Mr. Ventnor that Mr. Solante had called Tora his daughter and that his profession of paternal feeling hadn't stopped him from trying to rape her, or seduce her if that was what he called it. "She's fine." The lift opened, and she followed him down the hall.
"I understood she was badly hurt in the riot yesterday."
Cerise would have been delighted to share the details of Tora's injuries. "She's fine."
"Gratifying." He stood aside and ushered her through a door from the white and pearl hallway into a green and silver room where two people sat on cushions around a low black wood table.
Mr. Solante followed her inside. "You've met Mr. Ambrose. My other caller has declined to give his name."
Annia looked across the room at the figure standing against the draperies beside the door, and the blood rushed out of her head, leaving her face cold and numb. She knew that look: the distorted features, the empty expression. It was a cyborg, a clone from a series tinkered down so far its cortex no longer functioned. It had no mind, no personality, no consciousness. It was a walking, interactive drone controlled by a hunter-ship somewhere on Yetfurther, and there was only one reason for it to be in Solante's house.
He had betrayed her.
Mr. Solante said, "My other guest is looking for a pair of missing clones from a Federated Systems troop carrier. I know nothing about any clones, but he seems to distrust me."
Could Solante lie to the hunter without his autonomic reflexes giving him away, or was this a ploy to get Annia to reveal herself? So long as he didn't fear the hunter, Solante was probably sociopath enough to lie without being detected. What if Annia chose not to agree to whatever scheme he was about to propose? Would Solante turn her over to the hunter and expose Tora and Liam?
Mr. Solante sat down gracefully at the table. "Please be at ease," Ms. Annia. "I've asked you here to tell us about this disease which threatens to destroy my city and put me out of business."
Annia concentrated on getting to the table without giving away her shock. The cushions forced her to kneel or to lounge, as Solante and Mr. Ambrose did, resting on one elbo
w among the pillows. She managed to wedge a cushion under her so she could sit upright with her legs folded. She couldn't see the hunter behind her, but from time to time, the rank, rotting odor of its flesh raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
Mr. Solante waited until Annia gave up trying to find a more comfortable position. "I'm being told you are treating an epidemic in the town."
She needed to lie down with her knees up to relax the vaso-vagal constriction and let the blood flow back into her head. The scene felt dreamlike, disjointed as a nightmare. Unable to think clearly, she recited from memory. "It is a human-specific retro-virus."
Mr. Solante made an impatient gesture with his head. "How many people will it kill?"
Annia's head spun. It took her a confused moment to say, "Everyone. Everyone everywhere. Here, Cyrion, Yetfurther, the United Worlds, the Federation, the Commonwealth, the galaxy."
Mr. Ambrose said. "The True Believers will survive. Our resistance to disease is superior to the general population."
Mr. Solante said, "A more realistic estimate, please Ms. Annia."
Annia's head had begun to clear now she was on familiar territory. "Ten or twenty worlds in the Federation alone were firebombed in the first outbreak. There must have been twenty more lost in the second cycle, and that was before the gaean improvements to null-space travel. Today, an infected passenger could spread the disease to a new world before anyone knew he had been exposed. In less than five years, our civilization could be gone."
Mr. Ambrose shook his head. "The survivors..."
"There will not be survivors."
Mr. Ambrose said, "There are always survivors, Ms. Annia. They will have to be brought together." He turned to Solante. "Perhaps on one of the southern continents. We can establish some kind of local government."
Of the three, she didn't know which repulsed her more: Solante and Mr. Ambrose or the hunter. Millions of deaths on Yetfurther alone, and they were talking about seizing power over a smoldering slag heap. Annia struggled to her feet. "I don't have time to listen to the two of you plot to set yourselves up as Lord Emperor of Yetfurther and Pope of the True Believers." She turned toward the door, prepared to brave the cyborg standing beside it like a watchful grotesque.
Mr. Solante intercepted her. "You're right, of course, Ms. Annia." He took her elbow and, between pushing and supporting her, got her back to her cushion. He lounged beside her. "I didn't ask you here to debate politics or science." He acknowledged Mr. Ambrose with a nod. "Your problem is that you don't have a hospital, a lab, or a staff."
Annia waited for him to finish his recitation of the obvious.
"You need a facility big enough to house all your patients, medicines and medical equipment, and a staff to run your hospital while you work, and I happen to have those items to spare."
Her head started to spin again. A hospital. Resources. A place to work.
"A compiler," Solante said.
Annia's breath stopped.
"I can get you one."
She tried to stifle her eagerness. "I don't need one. The DPH has all my research. We just have to wait a little..."
Solante shook his head. "They have failed."
That made no sense. The Department of Planetary Health had her research. They had compilers. They could test thousands of DV variations an hour. "It's only been days."
Solante shrugged. "They are unable to create a domestic virus that will attack the disease. You, however, know more about it than anyone else."
That was flatly impossible. Certainly, the plague had been unstoppable in its first two outbreaks, but that was before DV technology. DVT had utterly changed medical science. Nothing had ever stood against it.
Modern medicine was almost totally dependent on domestic viruses. Antibiotics and antiviral drugs had reached a dead end, breeding ever more pernicious infectious organisms that culminated in the immune plagues of prehistory, and in Century Plague itself.
Century Plague had eclipsed all its forebearers. In its first two outbreaks, it had killed every citizen on a hundred worlds and forced the firebombing of at least that many just because a few hundred cases had been diagnosed in their populations.
And a decade after the last case of the plague had died, DV technology had been introduced by a Charmmes lab on Firstep. "Sib of a bad brood," Annia whispered. The Charmmes family had built the backbone of modern medicine on the foundation of Century Plague.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It couldn't have been called a negotiation. Mr. Solante told her what he would give her, and it was all far better than she had hoped: a fully equipped lab, a staff of two-hundred to tend the sick and every conceivable convenience and necessity.
When they finished, Mr. Solante guided her from the room, leaving the clone hunter behind. Annia stopped in the white-and-pearl atrium. She said, "The hunter's shipboard processor has already registered my identity. It knows Tora and Liam are here."
Solante said, "It knows you are here. It suspects me of selling the clones for you, and it will linger in my vicinity for a while to be sure."
Annia said, "By Federation law, my research belongs to the government. I've effectively stolen it along with two clones and a shuttle. If it decides to arrest me, I'll be sentenced to death."
He trailed one hot, dark fingertip down her cheek until she jerked her head away. "Ms. Annia, would I let an alien government steal my most valuable assets?"
Assets indeed. "The ship has probably already sent a message to the nearest FS vessel."
He tilted his head. "Our wise parliament has restricted the hunter ship from using Yetfurther satellites, so my guest will have to depart my house and jump atmosphere before his ship can communicate with your government." He set his hand on her neck and leaned close as if he meant to kiss her. She twisted her head aside. "You're under my protection, Ms. Annia. " He said it like a caress. "As long as I treasure you, you have nothing to fear from anything in the galaxy."
#
Liam stood on the perimeter of Murrayville with the black-skinned runner, Fist, and looked at the black-uniforms camped in the road almost two kilometers away. A long-limbed girl with black hair in a tail of knots like Maycee's said, "They're just standing there like they're waiting for something."
Liam said, "How many south?"
"None. They've got flitters and hovervans circling us, but the foot soldiers are all right here."
Humans used distance-viewers to see things far away. Liam did not have to do that. He concentrated on seeing far-off, and the black-uniform enemies became clear to him. They kept their faces turned toward Murrayville, but their shoulders were turned away. Guards watched the road from Murrayville to Cyrion, but the rest stood or ate or rested in groups. Numbers and relationships shifted in Liam's head. He glanced over his shoulder toward the heart of Murrayville. His spatial sense said the enemy that frightened the black-uniforms was already in Murrayville, but that did not make sense. There was no enemy in Murrayville. Only the disease and the blue-sash enemies, but those things did not frighten the black-uniforms.
He scanned the black-uniforms again, thought about flitters and hovervans circling Murrayville. The enemy was here but not here. How can an enemy be here but not here? Then, looking with his long-vision, he saw a black-uniform enemy look back toward Cyrion and then up at the sky. The enemy is here but not here when it is not here yet. He turned to Fist. "What comes from Cyrion and is big enough to frighten black-uniforms?"
Fist shrugged. "I don't know."
Liam said, "Comes from the sky."
The two runners exchanged looks. The girl said, "Gunships?"
Fist shook his head. "Firebombs."
#
The Elizabeth-Belle enemy said loudly, "He needs real medical attention from a fully-equipped facility."
"Cannot move him," Cho'en repeated, and her bells said, rising impatience,/busy/subdued distress.
"Any damage from the move could be repaired in hours at a real hospital."
&n
bsp; The Jordan-Kyle said, "I'd rather go, Mother Cho'en/Ka."
Cho'en's bells said, mild rebuke. "Too dangerous."
"I can pilot the ship by voice control, and maybe if we brought Maycee home, we could find some way to help her."
Cho'en said, "She will stay. You may go if that is what you want."
The Elizabeth-Belle said, "I can pilot the Starskate as far as the lake and make a water landing. I'll need someone to help me get Jordan-Kyle down to the dock and on board."
"Will help," Cho'en said.
Tora was pleased to see the Elizabeth-Belle leave the camp to go get the Jordan- Kyle's ship. Tora went to the other lot to discuss with her lieutenants how to get supplies to the quarantined humans. She stopped when she saw Annia come in through the gate. Annia was stiff and frightened. She went directly to Cho'en. Tora joined them.
Annia said, "He told me why the DPH hasn't found an anti-virus. Century Plague is immune to DV therapy. We're not going to get a cure any time soon, and I need the help he can give me."
Tora knew who Annia was talking about. She frowned. "Solante is enemy."
Annia said, "I know, Tora, but the epidemic is an enemy, too. We have to fight that first."
Tora scowled, but sometimes you had to make allies with one enemy to fight a bigger enemy. She knew that from General Baldwin. "Disease enemy is priority."
Annia said, "Cyrion already knows it can't stop the plague. The only thing they can do is quarantine us. If I could get to the bounce station, I might be able to talk to my contact in the city and share information...or with the Navy base, but they must have been in contact with the DPH in Cyrion."
At that moment, the Elizabeth-Belle came back through the front gates very angry. "They wouldn't let me out," she said. "This whole slum is surrounded by police in riot uniforms. They stopped me at the checkpoint and told me to turn back. Me! As if I were a refugee. They wouldn't even let me call Mother Louise."
Farenough: Strangers Book 2 Page 8
