Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  “It’s man-made,” Griff told me, glaring at Cloves. “Bio warfare maybe? And on a cellular level. Nothing we’ve ever seen before, though it does have similarities to some of our nastier diseases.”

  Great, this was all we needed.

  He clearly saw the weariness in my expression. “The good news is, it doesn’t seem to be remotely contagious.” He shrugged. “To people at least.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, frowning.

  “Doctor Do-good here has taken the liberty of running some tests on your infected rats,” Cloves said with derision. “Exposing them to the virus carried in the cells of our blank-faced Typhoid Mary through there. The control rats didn’t react. Those you have pumped full of the Pale virus, however, that’s a different story. They’re all dead.”

  I stared at them both.

  “That’s right,” Cloves nodded. “Your other lab skivvy out there is running the final data now, since I finally managed to sober her up. But it’s fairly conclusive. Seems our mystery girl from under Folly Bridge might be the answer to the Pale virus problem.” She shrugged. “In a very permanent way.”

  “I need to see the results right now,” I said. I wanted to get out of bed. I was no longer wearing my elegant ball gown, just basic scrubs. I really hoped it had been Lucy who’d undressed me, not Griff. I still had my dangly diamond earrings in, however, which made me feel a little surreal. I was surprised Cloves hadn’t torn them out of my ears while I was asleep, but I suppose she was a little pre-occupied.

  “What you need is to rest,” Griff repeated.

  “And again, tough.” Cloves leaned towards me, blocking Griff out. “You have one hour, Harkness. If you want to tinker with your corpse down here, then fine. But meet me upstairs in the lobby when you’re done. One…hour.” She held up a finger, warding off my questioning frown. “There’s someone up there demanding to see you, but I don’t mind making them wait a little longer.” She made a face, practically snarling. “And there’s no way in hell they’re getting past reception.”

  I looked at her questioningly.

  “GO,” she explained, turning to the door, apparently done with me for now.

  My first thought was Allesandro. Random, I know, but who else would come and find me at Blue Lab? It’s not like I had a lot of GO friends.

  “Vampire? Here in Blue Lab?” I spluttered. “What the hell?” I couldn’t imagine the vampire Clan Master, Duke of Sanctum, sitting in the lobby patiently reading a magazine.

  “Close but no cigar,” Cloves said from the door. “Tribal. Says her name is Sofia and that Kane sent her. She wants your help with something.” She paused with her black-gloved hand on the door handle. “Busy girl, aren’t you?”

  16.

  Lucy brought me regular work clothes, and as soon as I’d dressed myself, I demanded to see the full results of this viral testing. The corpse had been vacuum bagged, just a precaution in case whatever the virus was mutated, became airborne, or decided it did like the taste of humans after all. At present though, both Griff and Lucy confirmed it seemed to target only the Pale virus.

  “Which is something of a concern for you, potentially,” Griff said in a quiet aside. “You haven’t shown any symptoms, so I think the fact your system is flooded with Epsilon has spared you any infection from this bad boy. But it’s still a worry given your current carrier state. Thought it best to tidy up the wet-work before you got back.” He gave me a smile. “But there’s plenty of paperwork for you to dissect.”

  I read through the findings.

  “What am I looking at here?” I scanned the data strewn across my desk while Lucy passed me some of the horrible brown mud which passes for coffee in here. “This is a filovirus?” I indicated the image in the printout, showing the microscope snapshot of the virus they had found. “Filamentous particles here, in the usual shepherd’s crook shape. Coiled or branched. This is what, eighty nanometres wide, fourteen thousand long?”

  “Give or take,” Lucy nodded. “What’s a nanometer between friends?” She had a coffee too and a couple of painkillers in her other hand, which she downed unceremoniously. Clearly she was still coming down on the wrong side of champagne.

  “A single-stranded genome. Seven genes,” I read, muttering to myself. “…virion attached to cell-surface receptors, probably the c-type lectins…” I made a face. “This is perfectly normal for many viruses, but we’ve already established that this body is anything but a normal host.”

  Faceless, hairless, fingerprint-free girl. Not normal by any stretch.

  “After attaching, there’s been some fusion of the viral envelope with the cellular membranes, look here.” Lucy pointed. I traced the cellular image with my fingertip.

  “That’s where we thought we identified it,” Griff shrugged. “The viral envelope glycoprotein GP has been cleaved.”

  I wondered briefly if Lucy had any more aspirin about her person. The Epsilon was stabilising in my body and I was feeling much more myself, but the downside of this was that my head was now aching where blondie had kissed me with his gun. It wasn’t conducive to lab analysis.

  “The structural GP is what gives this nasty little virus the ability to bind and infect any targeted cells,” Lucy said. “What we’ve seen, while you were…well…strapped to a table thrashing around and then later…snoring…” She smiled in her lopsided way, “…is the RNA uncoating and transcribing the genes into positive strand mRNAs. Newly synthesised structural proteins and genomes then self-assemble and accumulate near the inside of the cell membrane. These progeny particles then infect other cells to repeat the cycle. It’s fast replicating, Doc. Spreads faster than butter on hot toast.”

  “Is it Ebola?” I asked, looking up at my team. It certainly shared a lot of viral characteristics. There hadn’t been a reported case in twenty five years.

  “Not unless it’s a man-made strain. And somehow…well…sentient, and a whole lot faster.” Griff shook his head. He looked very concerned.

  “How much faster?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “So fast it’s hard to study,” he said. “The host body, she seems intact, no symptoms, but she is absolutely teeming with this virus. Once we identified it, naturally we ran rat tests. In the healthy, non-infected control rats, exposure to this virus, even by injection, had had no effect. The virus just dries up and dies inside them, harmless. I can’t explain it. It doesn’t want anything to do with them.”

  “But in the rats you infected with the Pale virus?” I asked, flipping through the data on the datascreens. I read aloud to myself from the notes:

  “In all Pale-non-Epsilon rodents tested, once infected, endothelial cells lining the inside of blood vessels, liver cells, and several types of immune cells were within moments the main targets of violent infection. Following infection via lymph nodes, the virus entered the bloodstream and lymphatic system and spread throughout the subject. Macrophages are the first cells infected with the virus, and this infection results in…” I paused, blinking at the words on the screen, “…programmed cell death.”

  I looked at them both. “Jesus. How many died?”

  “All of them,” Lucy said solemnly, running her fingertip around the lip of her coffee mug. “One hundred percent mortality rate, and within minutes every time.” She shook her head gently. “If this was something natural, some other form of haemorrhagic fever, we’d be expecting to see an incubation period of maybe a few days to a week. But this? This shows symptoms within seconds. Vomiting, bowel-voiding, massive shutdown of liver and kidneys, followed by blood loss, haemorrhaging from mouth, snouts, eyes and everywhere else you care to mention. Nothing in nature works this fast, thank God.”

  “Rats can’t vomit, Lucy,” I muttered absently, my eyes scanning the screen.

  She shrugged. “I know what I saw.”

  I stared at the information in front of me. A plague. This was Ebola, the Black Death, and every other fatal virus you could care to mention rolled into one, an
d it was sitting in our lab. True, the lab was secure, airtight, subterranean and bulletproof. It had been built for this. But we had found this little demon floating in the river, which was bad. Where the hell had this corpse come from in the first place?

  “We’re certain – and I mean absolutely certain – it’s non-transferrable to the healthy, non-Pale rodent specimens?” I checked.

  Both my team nodded. “And also, none of the three of us appear to be vomiting or bleeding out of our eyes,” Griff noted. “Nor have we heard of anyone involved in the clean-up crew down by Folly Bridge becoming ill. I checked with Dr Denison.”

  Lucy sat on the edge of my desk, flipping through the manila folder filled with worrying viral statistics. “I think the only people who have any real worry about this virus, Doc, are the feral ones outside our walls.” Griff and I both looked at her. “All I’m saying is that this could end the Pale. Cloves could have a point. It’s like the grim reaper for anything GO.”

  Something occurred to me. “That’s a point. How do we know it only affects the Pale?”

  “I already told you,” Griff said. “No one who’s come into contact with it has died.”

  “No human you mean,” I said. “We have no idea if this virus is Pale-specific. What if it affects other GOs? Vampires, Tribals, Bonewalkers, the rest of them? They could all be susceptible.” The thought worried me a lot. Surprisingly I found myself thinking not of Allesandro, but of the Tribal families Kane had spoken of. The children living in the Botanical. “We can’t rule it out, and we definitely need to keep that corpse and any samples under lock and key until we do know.”

  Griff and Lucy both looked a little sickly at the thought. “Oh, that hadn’t occurred to me,” Lucy said softly. “All those poor vampires? How would we check? It would be hard to find a willing test subject, I think. From anyone amongst the GO ranks.”

  “The concern then,” Griff said, “…is not this body. We have this one, and it’s safe here under eight levels of subterranean high-security. The concern is that it floated into the river from somewhere. Where did it come from, and how the hell did it get infected?”

  And did this have anything to do with the serial killer murders, or the missing students, or Chase nice-to-meet-you-here’s-a-gun-to-the-head-Pargate, I thought to myself.

  “I want this information taking to Cloves,” I said, standing. “I have a random GO of my very own to deal with waiting upstairs.” I paused, considering carefully. “But, I think when we tell the charming Veronica about this, we should downplay what we know…for now. Just tell her that it’s a powerful virus and it needs to be contained here. She’s no lover of GOs of any kind. I don’t want her getting any…ideas. I’ve seen how previous work done here has been weaponised in the war against the Pale. It never ends well.”

  “Got it,” Griff nodded. I never had to explain myself to him. “We’ll stick to bare facts, keep it simple, until we know more.”

  I looked to Lucy. “I have to deal with the Tribal in the lobby,” I said. “Are you okay to hold the fort here?” She nodded bravely. “No one gets near the corpse. It doesn’t leave here, got it?” Lucy gave me a small salute.

  “Sigh,” she said theatrically. “Only a few hours ago I was sipping champagne in the most exclusive party in the city. Now here I am, back in the basement with a diseased corpse for company. Story of my life, Doc.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to hook up with an old corpse?” I grinned.

  “Yeah, but a rich one with a will.” She sulked. “And I don’t mean in the sack.”

  17.

  Sofia sat on one of the surgically uncomfortable sofas in the atrium. She was wearing black leather trousers and some kind of old bomber jacket, her long hair tied up in a severe ponytail. She looked just as put-upon as when she had met us at the Botanical. That seemed like a long time ago to me. Several dead students, a party, and a concussion ago.

  Her golden eyes flicked up impatiently to me as Griff and I exited the elevator, and she threw down the magazine she had been reading, standing immediately.

  “Doctor Harkness,” she said. “At last you appear. I have been waiting here very long for you.” She did not sound, or look, remotely impressed.

  “Indeed. It’s been rather hectic,” I said. “What is it I can do for you, Miss…?” I had forgotten her last name, if she had ever given it to me. I held out my hand as I reached the seating area, but she made no move to shake it. Or indeed give any indication she had seen it, standing with her arms folded, weight on one hip.

  “Sofia,” she said curtly, her chin sticking out defiantly. “Kane sends me to you.” She glared at Griff. “Only to you.”

  I gave Griff an apologetic smile. “Get the lab info across to Cloves, okay?” I said. “I’ll…handle this.”

  Griff gave me a questioning look, clearly not trusting the Tribal woman much. But he nodded and wandered off without arguing, leaving the two of us alone.

  “So, Kane sent you to me. For what reason?” I asked.

  Sofia looked around the atrium suspiciously. “I will tell you, but not here. In the car.”

  The car? We were going somewhere apparently.

  “I do not like your place of work, Doctor,” she said quietly as she stalked towards the doors. “Cabal keeps secrets here, terrible ones. I can smell them. Deep underground.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. I had poked my nose into some of Blue Lab’s shadows last year, and found them to be very dark indeed. But my lab was my kingdom. I might work in the belly of the beast, but in my defence, I thought it preferable to being caught in its jaws.

  It was still dark outside, and I realised as I followed Sofia across the university car park, watching her red pony tail swish angrily from side to side, that I had no idea what time it was.

  “Sofia, do you want to tell me what this is about please?” I asked as politely as I could manage. “To be honest, I’ve had a hell of a night so far.”

  She stopped by a low grey Nissan and looked me up and down. “Yes, I am sure you have. When I arrived at Blue Lab they told me you had just returned from a party. A difficult life you lead, Doctor. Clearly you were as shaken as Kane to discover the slaughter at the University campus. Thank heavens you managed to rally enough to maintain your social calendar.”

  I didn’t rise to her scorn. It was clear that the true events at Scott Towers were not public knowledge yet. And probably not likely to be in the future either. Not if Cloves had a hand in it.

  “Well, your ‘hell of a night’ is probably not going to get any easier,” she said with a smirk. “Kane wishes you to probe for him.”

  My eyebrows disappeared somewhere into my hairline.

  “Excuse me?”

  She opened the car door. “It is almost two in the morning, Doctor Harkness,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat. Ah well, at least that answered one question for me. I was still in the same night then, no wonder I was tired. “Much of your vampire district nightclubs will only just be getting into full swing at this time, yes?”

  I leaned in the passenger seat window. “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “And what does Kane mean, probe? No offence, but I don’t work for Kane. To be honest, I barely work for Cabal. I mainly deal with diseases. In fact I’ve got a doozy of a one back in the lab I would like to spend more than five minutes with.”

  Sofia rolled her eyes. “Get in the car will you please?” When I made no move to comply, she looked at me wearily for a few seconds. Eventually she sighed.

  “Look, I am not going to bite you,” she said. “Kane is concerned about the missing students at the university, as you know. Very concerned. He is looking into his own enquiries. One of which has led to the students’ teacher, Amanda Bishop.”

  She was certainly cropping up everywhere a lot. I almost told Sofia I’d been trying to look into victim number two myself at Scott Towers earlier this evening, but thought better of sharing for now. I didn’t have much of a hand
le on the redhead yet. She was hostile. I didn’t know if I could trust her with any information.

  “What about the teacher?” I asked. “We already know she’s dead, even if the general public don’t. She’s mincemeat, as are two of her students. It’s the other students who are missing, right?”

  “She was what you people call a Helsing, it seems,” Sofia sneered. “Those pathetic humans who sniff after vampires and treat them like movie stars or heroes.” She scoffed. “Pathetic, I know. Apparently she kept this side of her life very, very private. You can of course understand this. She was being courted by Scott Enterprises. A good career prospect. Don’t want the Mankind Movement’s largest supporter finding out you have a fang fetish, no? It could close certain doors if this came to light.”

  I opened the door and slid into the car beside her. “Go on,” I said, wondering whether Oscar had known her after all. If they were both Helsings, I found it hard to believe he hadn’t at least run into her before in the district. Had he lied to me?

  Sofia put the car in gear. “The night before Miss Bishop ‘disappeared’, she was seen with others at Under Yellowmoon. Do you know it?”

  I nodded. It was one of the vamp clubs on St Giles, not far from Sanctum itself.

  “Kane wishes you to accompany me there. We have questions which may be answered by the vampires.”

  “A Tribal, in a vampire club?” I stuttered in disbelief. “That’s kind of…unheard of.” Vampires and Tribals don’t mix as a rule. This could be deeply disastrous. “I don’t think the vampires will talk to you, Sofia.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Kane believes this also. And I have little desire to speak with them.” She smiled. “But they will talk to you, Doctor. You are well-connected. The bridge between all our worlds, or so Kane believes. He has much faith in you.” She glanced sidelong at me, evidently not sharing his belief. “Tonight their leader will be there, at this club, and it is him we must probe.” She spun the car around in the car-park. Headlights illuminating the ancient stone walls in a strobe.