Mercury's Bane: Book One of the Earth Dawning Series
Page 31
As she strode through the empty hallways her heart began to race in her chest. She didn’t like this, didn’t like it at all. When they got to the med bay at last to see Pike pacing and Nhean jiggling a foot anxiously, her misgivings deepened.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s … bad.” Nhean met her eyes. “The girl—”
“Let the doctor tell it,” Pike said flatly. His tone said that he wasn’t ready to give up his grudge yet.
Nhean fell silent, gaze down. He didn’t seem to think this was a fight worth having, and Walker didn’t have time for it anyway. She sought out the doctor’s eyes and raised her eyebrows.
Doc LaScalla brushed her black braid over her shoulder. “She wasn’t responding to standard treatment,” the woman said quietly. “So I ran an analysis on her DNA—there are sequences that can signal different treatment options.”
“And?” Walker frowned.
LaScalla sighed and tapped a button. A display came up on the wall, lines of code blinking an angry red in between the strands of different shades of green. “These,” she said, pointing to the dark green, “are very standard. Match plenty of things in the database. These lighter green ones … well, we’ll get to that in a minute. But these don’t match anything in our system at all. The ones marked red.”
Walker shook her head. “So…?”
“So, we’ve got the genomes of millions of humans in here. The odds of even one sequence being this far out of normal, much less nine? Vanishingly small. And I looked at them myself, just to make sure.”
“Cut to the chase, LaScalla.”
“They’re not human genes.” LaScalla delivered the news with a wry smile. She looked a the girl, still lying prone on the bed. “She? Is not all human.”
Walker had to force herself to speak. “That can’t be right. Looks pretty damn human to me.”
“Trust me, I checked my work. A lot.”
Walker stepped closer, shaking. She looked so human, that was the thing. She looked so human, and she wasn’t. Was that even possible? “What do they do? Those sequences.”
“We don’t know.” LaScalla was honest, at least. “That’s where the other part comes in. The ones I’ve marked light green here.” She pointed at the flashing sequences.
Walker’s fingers tightened on the railing. “It’s worse, isn’t it? That other part.”
“Yeah. It is.” LaScalla looked down. “They match … one very specific group.”
“Spit it out, LaScalla.”
“The drones.” It was Nhean. He stood at last.
“The ones we got out of the chain gangs on Earth?”
“The same. No one noticed at the time. That seemed like the least of our worries when we got them off-planet. We couldn’t get them to do much of anything, really, so how they responded to chemo and the rest was … not something we paid attention to. We essentially just forgot about them.”
“Does it matter?”
“You tell me.” His eyes met hers. “Where did they all go? Once we got them off-planet?”
Walker shrugged. “All over the solar system, I guess.” She looked over at Delaney, who lifted his shoulders as well.
“I think some of them went to Venus,” he continued. “We tried to give them government jobs. They were … vulnerable. People were using them the way the Telestines did. They went all over, though, really. Mars. The Jupiter Snowballs. The stations. Asteroid belt.” Nhean looked white, and grim. “They’re everywhere.”
He glanced at Pike, and for just a moment, there was a shadow of understanding between them. Walker traced the look.
“What is it?”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t say she matches their DNA,” Nhean suggested. “Perhaps we should say that they match hers—very, very closely.” His eyes held hers. He saw the dawning horror there, and nodded. “Yes. We’ve checked. Every one of them has the non-human sequences as well. The same non-human sequences.”
The world had dropped out from under her. Walker felt her fingers clench around the metal railing on the girl’s bed.
Everywhere. They were everywhere by now: hundreds, possibly thousands, of human-Telestine hybrids on the stations—cleaning the government offices, fixing the life support systems, doing maintenance on the cargo haulers. There wasn’t a hope in hell of tracking them all down. And they knew now what those hybrids were capable of.
A horrified silence stilled the med bay.
The girl’s eyes snapped open.
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