In the Stars I'll Find You

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  Lungs burning, he checked his watch one last time—mere moments before the helicopter crested the top of the Demeter IV. He stepped into the pressurizing chamber and waited until the air pressure dropped and the green light above the door lit before stepping outside.

  The wind wasn’t strong but it was bone-chilling cold. August over the southern hemisphere was unpleasant, especially sixteen thousand feet up. He was suddenly glad he’d sprinted the stairs, because as the helicopter came to a near-landing above the platform, the wind blew straight through his wool sweater, sucking away every calorie of warmth he’d built up.

  The helicopter door slid open, and Heather, helped by a soldier wearing a blue uniform and full head gear, hopped down from the landing struts and onto the platform. The soldier waved a salute as the helicopter lifted and peeled away.

  Heather, her long brown hair whipping in the wind, gave Marc a kiss and a hug as deep as he could remember.

  “What was that for?” he shouted above the sound of the rotors.

  “Vienna’s lonely without you.” She’d stepped back and was now hugging her waist and hopping up and down. “Come on, let’s get inside”

  “Why, you cold?”

  “Jackass.” She shouldered past him and whipped the door open, a door that had been keyed to her fingerprints since their mission had started a little over a year ago.

  As they began taking the stairs down, Marc became painfully aware that she wasn’t going to speak.

  “Are you going to tell me what they said?”

  She glanced over to him, but then continued winding her way down.

  “Heather,” he said, taking her by the arm and forcing her to stop. “Tell me what they said.”

  And now it was Heather’s turn to look at her watch. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “I mean, not yet.” Her words were sharp, forceful, something he’d seen her use in her capacity as station chief many times, but not with him. Never with him.

  She noticed his reaction and visibly relaxed her shoulders, then her jaw, and finally her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry, Marc. I’ll tell you as soon as I can. You said you had news, too.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Marc, if you had the clearance, don’t you think I’d tell you?”

  “I can’t tell any more.”

  She stepped forward until they were only inches from one another. He could smell her perfume—lavender—that always seemed to war with the carrot body wash she used. He could see how serious her eyes were. How angry.

  “Do you want to show me the progress you’ve made or do you want Vinay to do it?”

  They’d spent hours on video chats since she’d left for Vienna. She’d ended up staying two weeks longer than she’d originally planned, and she’d grown progressively more reticent as the days had passed. The UN meetings had grown more complex as countries fought over security forces and food allotments both, and the pressure had grown on Heather to produce results, to release what advancements they’d already made in hopes of creating some crops, even if the bloom adapted and crippled them again the next year. But Heather and the director had stuck to their guns, and Marc had given her what support he could from ten thousand miles away.

  Through all of this, Heather had never seemed cross, never angry, but he could see her anger now. He could feel it to the core of his being. Though he’d known her for a year and they’d been sleeping together for months, he didn’t know her as well as he might. Still, he never thought to find himself on the receiving end of a look that withered, especially from a woman who behind closed doors was always so tender.

  “I’ll do it,” he finally said.

  She nodded, and then turned, heading down toward decon.

  * * *

  Bloom was first introduced to the wheat fields of Kenya in June of 2026. Within days, the first of the crops withered. Within weeks, it had spread to neighboring fields. Looking back, many were surprised to find that the bacteria never moved beyond the borders of Kenya. This was believed to be a miscalibration on the part of the scientists employed by the terrorist cell that had paid to have the technology stolen and brought to Somalia. Ironically, if they had had proper scientists in their employ, the catastrophe would have begun nine months earlier than it actually did.

  When Kenya saw what had happened, they stopped at nothing to prevent a repeat of the disaster that led directly and indirectly to the death of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans. The crop failures led to not only a shortage in food, but money. The fragile infrastructure of the country crumbled. Diseases which had barely been in check grew rampant, leading to more deaths. Civil unrest was not far behind. Within months, bloody riots that swept entire regions of the country were commonplace.

  If the leaders of Kenya saw one small glimmer of hope it was in their military. They reasoned that if the perpetrators of this crime could be brought to justice, the tide of discontent might be stemmed, at least long enough for international peace agencies to finally engage. In their zeal they pushed deep into Somalia and found the very complex from which the bloom had been dispatched. If only the soldiers had been more properly briefed they might have known that destroying the canisters in the facility might lead to a recurrence of the horror from the year before.

  They didn’t, and shortly after, it was discovered that the prevailing winds had delivered bloom to the southern plains of Ethiopia.

  * * *

  After Marc and Heather had both gone through decontamination, they changed into their white Tyveks, blue masks, and wide, crystal-clear goggles. When they got to botany, Vinay was there along with the rest of the team, each of them a white-and-blue simulacrum of Marc and Heather. It was difficult to discern mood in someone wearing the uniform, but Marc could already tell that the day hadn’t gone well.

  As they approached, Vinay shook his head, his brown eyes sad behind his goggles.

  “What happened?” Marc asked.

  Vinay led them to a workbench with a monitor that was replaying a time-lapse of the bloom from the pressure chamber that sat just next to it. The bloom bacteria grew and divided voraciously on an agar plate infused with wheat proteins.

  Vinay waggled his head—half in apology, half in frustration—and motioned to the monitor. “The boxcar isn’t delivering fast enough.”

  Marc gripped the back of the swivel chair sitting in front of the workbench.

  The boxcar was an RNA substring that had been grafted onto the wheat strains. It delivered to the bloom—as the wheat cells were being devoured—a series of plasmids that caused the bloom to slow its ability to enter its exponential growth phase. This would normally do little, but the boxcar was ingenious, at least in its intent. The bloom bacteria shared RNA strings amongst themselves, a defense mechanism of sorts that allowed living bacteria to adopt beneficial mutations. Vinay had discovered a key sequence that was traded at a high rate among bacteria. That sequence was the one the boxcar replaced, but the timing was critical—too slow and the boxcar stagnated; too fast and the bacteria died before it could spread the boxcar to its siblings.

  As the video began again, showing clearly the boxcar was once again too slow, Marc shoved the chair forward, crashing it against the bench. “Fuck!”

  Heather, staring at the loop as if it were the final scene in a murder mystery, rubbed the back of his neck with rubber-gloved hands. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll find it.”

  He nodded, knowing her words were hollow. “I know,” he said, feeling every bit as hollow.

  He and Heather made love that night. It wasn’t exactly make-up sex, because they hadn’t exactly had an argument, but as they lay in her bed, as he ran his hand softly over the smooth skin of her back, he wondered just what had happened. She’d been so coldly angry that he had wondered when the slow fuse would lead to detonation. But the explosion had never come. Instead what he’d found was a woman as caring and as engaged as he could ever remember her bein
g.

  And the timing for this change in behavior? Their collective failure as seen clearly on the monitor in botany.

  He was intensely curious what had happened in Vienna—so much so that a half-dozen times he nearly brought it up again—but for now he left it alone.

  In time, he said to himself, the stress of Vienna would fade and she would tell him.

  * * *

  The bacteria that created the bloom was designed to attack wheat. It altered the DNA of the plant, causing its cell structures to weaken with exposure to ultraviolet light—a curious effect, as the bacteria itself was likewise susceptible, which was why it thrived on the underside of leaves and the base of the wheat plant. Within days, the wheat began to yellow. Within weeks, it deteriorated until entire fields fell under the attack. The bacteria did not feed upon the wheat directly, but rather the constituent parts of the decaying plant. It depended upon the gene alteration working, and thus its engineers thought that it would self-control; when the wheat fields died, so would the bloom. They knew that the bacteria would become airborne as the nutrients it needed for life grew low. What they didn’t realize was just how long the bacteria could go dormant before eventually dying.

  As it turned out, they were off by a factor of one hundred.

  Aid workers and scientists that came to study the bloom picked some up on their clothes, their hair, their skin. It was transferred to their luggage, their money, their hotels. They brought it with them on Land Rovers and buses and airplanes. And eventually they brought it home.

  To other fields of wheat.

  And soon, not only was the third bloom discovered, but the fourth, and the tenth, and the hundredth.

  * * *

  The cure came twelve days later.

  Marc was sitting in front of his monitor watching the bloom’s progress in real-time when he realized he’d been there for hours—much longer than it normally would have taken for him to be sure that the alterations made to the boxcar had failed. He must have made a thousand iterations to the boxcar. Vinay had made just as many or more. Clay, Kristie, and Shankar, similar. In total they’d all sequenced and executed over five thousand combinations, and none of them had lasted this long.

  He replayed the recorded progression in fast-time and saw what he and the others had been hoping to find since they’d started.

  The bloom was clearly hampered. It wasn’t perfect—the growth of the bacteria had not completely been defeated—but it was close. Very close.

  He desperately needed to share this, but he was so tired the only thing he could manage was to turn to Vinay, twist the monitor toward him, and smile.

  Vinay watched, rapt, for over a minute. He picked up Marc’s paper-thin tablet, glanced at the video one more time, and then whooped so loudly that Kristie yelped in surprise two stations over.

  With this success, it took only three more iterations to find the right combination.

  When he was done, Marc realized he’d been awake for forty-two hours straight. He hadn’t eaten in a day.

  “I’m going to get some sleep,” he said to Vinay. “I need to think straight before I can sign off on this.”

  “No problem,” Vinay said, and though his expression was hidden by his mask, Marc could tell he was grinning from ear-to-ear.

  * * *

  Marc woke with Heather sitting in the armchair by his bed.

  He checked the time. He’d been asleep for a little over three hours.

  “Can this wait?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, wishing she’d go away, just for an hour or two, but then he sighed and pulled himself higher until he was resting against the headboard. After pinching his eyes until they hurt, he focused them on Heather, only then realizing how dead serious she looked.

  “Did you hear?” he asked.

  “I heard.”

  “Then, Heather, for the love of God, please tell me why you aren’t smiling.”

  Heather uncrossed her legs, leaned forward in her chair, and propped herself, elbows-on-knees. She looked small, thin, vulnerable. He didn’t know why, but he had the immediate impression it was calculated.

  “Vinay’s running around downstairs saying we’re going to release the strain tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

  “I still have to run it through the final paces, but yeah, it looks promising.”

  “Releases go through me, Marc.”

  “I know they do, Heather. I’ll present everything once it’s ready.”

  “We can’t afford a rush to judgment.”

  “We can’t afford delays.”

  “A premature release may create a more resistant strain of the bloom. You know that.”

  Marc pulled himself up higher, suddenly feeling very inadequate with no clothes on, which in turn made him wonder if Heather had chosen this time and place for that very reason. “I know that better than you do. Believe me when I say that we’ve taken it into account.”

  Heather stood and began pacing at the foot of the bed. “The lives of millions are in our hands.”

  “Heather, stop.” Marc got out of bed and pulled on the pair of pants he’d thrown to the floor just before collapsing into bed. “We’ll test it. We’ll get it peer-reviewed. We’ll have the other stations run the results. Vinay probably gave them the sequencing by now.”

  “No,” she said, stopping abruptly and facing him. “I’ve cut off communication.”

  “You what?”

  “We’re going to slow down on this, Marc. You and the team are going to regress the boxcar against all known species of Poales.”

  “Bullshit. The UN agreed to regression by subfamily, not order.”

  “You wanted to know what happened in Vienna? That’s what happened. The US pushed for it, and they got it.”

  “Why? It’s unnecessary.”

  “That’s not what Lauren Cardwell thinks.”

  “She’s a fucking figurehead, Heather!”

  “She runs the CDC, Marc. Things have changed since you left Washington. She’s got a lot of weight behind her now.”

  Marc froze, her words playing over and over in his mind.

  His ears started to ring. The drab blue walls of the room began to swim.

  Just before his marathon in the lab, he’d been catching up on the news. Like everyone else in the world, Washington was embroiled with China in talks about their predicted wheat reserves. The grain belt across the US Midwest had been decimated. China’s wheat fields, however, had barely been affected. It was believed that their yield would remain at three-quarters of their previous years’ output for two or more years, giving them incredible leverage in trade talks—as if China needed more leverage. Much of the rhetoric in Washington had been to give in to the Chinese demands before too much of their yields were spoken for, but there was a hard-line fringe that enjoyed a surprising amount of power in the halls of the Capitol. They demanded the president play hardball with his counterpart in Beijing.

  None of this disturbed Marc. What disturbed him were the implications a significant delay might have on those negotiations. Though the common wisdom was that China’s fields would outlast the bloom, there were those—Marc among them—that believed they would not. There were signs that the bloom was adjusting to the particular strain of wheat used across most of China’s growing fields. And if the world believed that China’s projected wheat yields would never materialize, it would return to Washington the equal footing it sought.

  “They want this so they don’t lose power, Heather? They want this so that they can right the ship?”

  Heather didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.

  “Millions stand to die if we don’t get this out.”

  She began walking toward the door. “Millions stand to die no matter what we do.”

  “Heather, stop.”

  He tried to follow as she left, but two men in blue uniforms standing just outside the door barred his way. One entered and took his tablet from his desk.
r />   “Check the bottom drawer,” Heather called from the hallway.

  The guard did and found his backup tablet.

  “This is a UN vessel!” he shouted at them.

  Heather pursed her lips. “Did you really think we wouldn’t get at least one of the stations, Marc? Transport’s coming in three hours. You might want to pack.”

  * * *

  Well before the worldwide yields of wheat plummeted, a UN panel was formed and given funding. Early attempts at controlling the bloom met with little success. The bacteria had now spread worldwide. It was discovered, however, that the bloom could not live above fifteen-thousand feet.

  This was a contributing factor to the decision to create four aerial research stations, but it was not the only one. Contention between the United States, China, and the European Union created a deadlock in the location of the official center of research for a new strain of bloom-resistant wheat. The only acceptable solution to the major powers of the world was to ensure they were beholden to international law, and the only way to guarantee that was to create stations that were unhindered by geography. Other research efforts were begun worldwide, but none of these were officially sanctioned by the UN.

  Within twelve weeks, the first of four mobile platforms had been built, outfitted with fresh wheat seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and launched. After each was assigned a cadre of leading microbiologists and botanical geneticists, the real work of defeating the bloom began.

  * * *

  Marc hadn’t been on this station for twelve months without customizing it a bit. Heather had cut off all wireless communication, but she didn’t know about the power-grid LAN he and Vinay had set up early on when they’d run into some interference from sunspot activity. After grabbing the ancient Blackberry he’d brought from home and hooking it up to a ridiculous series of cables and adapters, he connected to the LAN and sent Vinay a single, simple message: Get the canister ready.

  The ship had been built with dozens of contingencies, one of which was a simple way to jettison a canister that would emit a homing signal. He and Vinay were the emergency planning stewards, and though neither one of them cherished the role, they’d gone over the procedures with each other biweekly and with the entire team monthly. Heather, as it turned out, wasn’t much for protocol. She’d attended the first few meetings, but had begged off from the rest since, and he hoped that she didn’t remember this particular aspect of Demeter IV.