The Devil’s Noose

by Michael Angel

  Austen looked down and saw that the new serving contained an open-faced biscuit of sorts. Each half had a strange pinkish-yellow mixture placed atop it, sculpted into a moist pyramid. A slightly gamy smell rose from the plate as if in warning.

  Blaine finished what he had to say, picked one up, and took a hearty bite.

  “What is this?” he asked. “I’m guessing Eggs Benedict?”

  “Is not eggs,” Colonel Chelovik said. “Is mypalik. Sheep’s brain mixed with brine and yak’s butter.”

  “Ah.” Blaine’s face went gray. He put the biscuit down. “Pardon, General. You must excuse me.”

  Then he jumped up from the table and all but ran for the exit.

  “Poor Ian,” Preble chuckled. “There are times I almost want to feel sorry for the man. Rather a shame that he has to be such a prat.”

  Luckily, any insult that Votorov might have taken from Blaine’s abrupt departure was smoothed over by Amy Zhou. The General fairly beamed whenever the young woman spoke up or otherwise tried to gain his attention. He reacted the same way as she picked up where her colleague had left off.

  “Regardless of what this bacteria can do,” she said, in her high-pitched voice, “I think we’ve found something very rare – a purely lithographic organism.”

  Lelache looked up, startled. “That is quite an assertion!”

  “What does this mean, ‘lithographic’?” October asked.

  “It means that these bacteria exist only within a narrow band of rock strata inside the earth, independent from solar radiation. Even if the sun were to be snuffed out tomorrow, this organism would go on living as if nothing happened.”

  Almost against her will, Austen found herself getting caught up in the idea. “That makes a lot of sense, Amy. It would help explain why these bacteria are so deadly to life on the surface. It’s never had to adapt to any organism up here. The ‘reservoir species’ is simply the earth itself.”

  Zhao’s face broke out into a triumphant smile. “And it also provides evidence that helps to prove my theory about this pathogen’s contribution to the death of the dinosaurs!”

  Once again, the table went quiet.

  “Very well, I’ll throw in a quid,” Preble remarked. “How?”

  “I’d like to know too,” Navarro said. “If it took a deep-core mine excavation to reveal the pathogen in this small, limited way, how would dinosaurs get exposed all over the world?”

  Zhou took a deep breath before starting.

  “Okay. Here’s what I’m guessing. The key is how incredibly old Nostocales Diabolus seems to be, based on its simple cell structure. It’s simply never had to evolve, because it resides in a place without much evolutionary pressure. No predators, a low mutation rate, and easy access to energy to sustain its life processes.

  “It’s likely prevalent around the world, at similar depths and in places with a similar mix of minerals. A massive earthquake, the kind that opens up a continental rift valley, would expose the local wildlife to the bacteria, causing an outbreak. We know that quakes like this happened a lot in the Triassic and Jurassic.”

  “That would explain the clusters of pinpricks in finds from those eras,” Austen agreed.

  “But at the end of the Cretaceous, there was one major exposure,” Zhou went on. “The impact of a massive asteroid near what is now the Gulf of Mexico had to have been the key event. Blasting that much bacteria-laden subterranean rock and dust into the air would create a dust cloud that would encircle the earth.

  “You’d have an instant pandemic,” Austen breathed. “Even worse, you’d be exposing a global population of animals already weakened by the sudden shift in climate.”

  “Exactly.”

  Austen looked at the her anew. “You could be on to something here.”

  Chelovik leaned over and spoke in Votorov’s ear. The General nodded and said, “My second is curious to know. Can this happen again?”

  Everyone looked to Zhao. She pursed her lips in thought.

  “Maybe not on that scale, not exactly. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the organism was able to sustain and reproduce itself with unprecedented virulence. That’s because the atmosphere was much closer to what we encountered down in the mine. A higher degree of moisture, trace gases, and a lower level of oxygen.”

  “How did you come to that conclusion?” Lelache asked sharply. She sat forward, as if eagerly anticipating the answer.

  “Why, Doctor Blaine and I tested it out. Nostocales grows best at eighty degrees Celsius and fourteen percent oxygen.”

  Votorov and Chelovik listened intently. However, where Chelovik appeared to be chewing the information over in his mind, Votorov reacted quite differently. The man let out a belly laugh and grabbed for his glass of vodka.

  “Thank you, pretty woman,” he declared. “You and your friends have given me an entertaining evening. Better than American science fiction movie! I toast to you!”

  He downed his drink in one gulp. So did the rest of his men. Austen saw her opportunity while the man’s jovial mood remained.

  “Now that we’ve looked at the mine and the infirmary,” she said, “we still need to see some of the affected villages. Will you help us?”

  “Of course, of course,” Votorov said dismissively, as he got up to leave. His men followed suit. “Tomorrow morning. I will provide you with transport. Even an escort!”

  With that, the heavyset general staggered out of the room with his subordinates in tow. Austen watched him leave with mixed emotions. On the one hand, they were getting help where and when they needed it. On the other, she wondered if they’d accidentally convinced Votorov that the Devil’s Noose wasn’t a big threat outside the Cretaceous period.

  “Come on, everyone,” she said. “We’ve got to figure out how this bacteria actually does its dirty work. Maybe then we can come up with a cure. Because if this thing can remain infectious for six hours after it infects someone, then we’re still looking at a pandemic that’ll make the Spanish flu look like a case of the sniffles.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A sliver of morning sunlight managed to sneak in between two of the window’s vertical slats, falling across Austen’s face. She blinked and put up a hand to block it as she finally woke.

  She’d chosen one of the sleeping berths that had been carved out of the forest-green sides of Module B. The synthetic gel pillows and fiber blankets were soft enough, but they’d done little to keep her warm. She stretched and felt the cold, plastic end of her sleeping compartment under her toes.

  Now I know what it feels like to be a can of beer inside a plastic cooler, she thought, as she got up, careful not to knock her head on the bottom of the top berth.

  She groaned as she stumbled towards the module’s washroom to complete her morning toilette. The groan came as much from the feeling of injustice as anything else. On the one hand, Navarro and the others had been judicious with their vodka consumption. On the other, October simply appeared to be immune to the effects of alcohol.

  Not her. She’d had two sips, and now she had a hangover-worthy headache.

  Is this really what it’s all about? She shook her head as she contemplated the idea. Jetting off to god-knows-where to find killer pathogens is bad enough. But surviving an attack by a murderous, mobile bacteria and then getting rewarded with boiled sheep’s head for dinner and a hangover for dessert?

  Austen shook her head as she popped a caffeine pill and some painkillers. That was past, this was present. She was learning to move on.

  The smell of coffee, eggs, and breakfast sausage greeted her she walked into B-Module. The medical team had seated themselves around the main table. Someone had placed a fiery-hued bottle of Tabasco sauce in the middle along with the salt and pepper.

  Preble and Blaine were deep in a discussion that bordered on an outright argument. Lelache and Zhao remained off to one side, listening without comment. She didn’t see Redhawk or October, but Navarro stood by the microwave, waiting until the m
achine let out a ping.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing her a hot, plastic-covered tray and a cup of coffee. “Looks like you need it more than me. I’ll just nuke another tray for myself.”

  “Thanks.” She took what was offered and sat at the table. Peeling back the plastic covering the tray, she grabbed the spork that came with it and dug in. The eggs were a pale, spongy mass. The enclosed biscuit was both brick-hard and slick with moisture. And the sausage tasted like pork fat mixed with a solid helping of India rubber.

  After last night’s serving of beshbarmak, the microwaved breakfast tasted like ambrosia. She tossed a couple blots of tabasco over the eggs and wolfed her food down. Only then did she pay attention to Preble’s triumphant announcement.

  “Some of my lab tests finally came in,” he said. “And they prove something rather important: that I was right about how this pathogen kills its victims.”

  Austen moved over a little to let Navarro take a seat. “Okay, this I want to hear.”

  “The green and blue bits inside our new friend Nostocales Diabolus are the most complex organic chemical factories I’ve ever seen!”

  She considered. “That would explain the presence of those chloroplast-like structures, even without any sunlight. What do those bits throw off?”

  “Methane particles, just as Helen concluded.” Lelache held up her coffee mug in acknowledgement. “And that’s just for starters. It also throws off dimethyl sulfide – that’s what you were smelling down there, not hydrogen sulfide. Then we get to the really interesting bits. The lethal ones.”

  “Go on,” Lelache said, her expression inscrutable.

  “Those organelles also churn out something that used to be called ‘prussic acid’, at least in more genteel times.”

  “Hydrogen cyanide?” Austen set her coffee down. “That’s…actually quite possible.”

  “Cyanide in any combination sounds like bad news,” Navarro observed. “And this bug excretes it if it gets inside of you?”

  Preble nodded. “HCN is a potent neuromuscular scrambler, and worse, it completely halts cellular respiration.”

  “That explains the blue skin in the victims,” Austen concluded. “The signs of oxygen deprivation we found in all of the corpses. It’s pulmonary edema at the cellular level.”

  “It also tracks with the gas composition we found down there,” Zhao said, becoming animated again. “The early earth’s atmosphere contained higher levels of HCN, and it’s even been proposed to have played a part in the origin of life.”

  “The upshot is,” Preble concluded, “I was correct about the presence of a toxin. Nostocales kills you in the same way as anthrax. It’s not the bacteria itself, but the compounds that it throws off as it grows that throws a spanner into the body’s machinery.”

  “But the really important part,” Blaine broke in, “is that those same organelles dissolve base rocks and leave precious metals or rare earth minerals behind. The Karakul’s very existence is likely the result of this bacteria, and that’s got to be worth a great deal.”

  “At least it would be,” Austen said, “if it wasn’t so deadly. This isn’t something we can slip a leash on, Ian.”

  Blaine brushed off her concerns. “Yes, it’s lethal. But it doesn’t spread like flu, or the measles. You’ve already proved that it’s not spread through the air.”

  “We’ve only avoided an outbreak so far because we’re five hundred miles from the closest city,” Preble pointed out. “Nostocales is a self-sustaining colony of multiple strains. As far as I can tell, the more brilliantly blue the bacteria are, the more cyanide compounds they throw off.”

  “What about the green ones?” Lelache asked.

  “It seems that the greener strains are more adaptable to using waste heat, so they live longer. A network of these strains allows them to live long enough to poison anything they start growing in. That makes the greenest one, G240, the most dangerous of the bunch, even if it prefers a tenth less heat and oxygen.”

  Zhao began to offer her opinion. But no one heard what the younger scientist had to say. Her voice was drowned out by the sudden, ear-splitting sound of an alarm. Redhawk’s voice came in clearly over the ceiling-mounted speakers.

  “Fire alarm in D-Module! I repeat, we have a fire in the lab!”

  Austen felt the blood drain from her face as she jumped to her feet. Her coffee spilled out across the table, forgotten in the moment.

  Dear God, she thought. If the fire cracks the biosafety cabinets before the heat sterilizes the samples, then we’re looking at a truly catastrophic exposure event.

  With that cheering thought, she pushed through the adjoining trailer’s door. Navarro, Blaine, and Lelache followed close on her heels.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Lungs heaving, Austen dashed into the airlock chamber between Modules C and D. The UV light glared in her eyes as she dove into the protective gowning without pausing to wash her hands. Her companions followed suit, violating a half-dozen safety regulations in their wake.

  But minor things didn’t matter anymore. They were looking at a potential exposure and a potential crippling of their ability to study the pathogen. No one wasted a breath as they pulled on goggles, face masks, and gloves.

  Overlying everything was the nerve-racking klaxon of the fire alarm.

  Austen noted in passing that she didn’t see or smell smoke. But that didn’t mean as much as it might in a house or apartment building. The facility’s fans were still keeping everything under negative pressure. Any smoke would be pulled away from them and towards the lower modules, masking the fire’s extent.

  She reached for the controls to access the lab.

  “Check the door!” Navarro boomed. “If it’s hot, we could be looking at a flashover.”

  She nodded and touched the back of her hand to the door.

  “It feels cool,” she said.

  “What’re the odds of exposing ourselves to that…thing…if we go into there? These aren’t Class 3 or 4 suits.”

  She grimaced. “Depends on what’s cracked open, and what’s on fire. We won’t know until we go in. But I do know that there’s a brace of oxygen canisters at the other end of the module. If those go up, then the rest of the hazardous materials in the next Module will go off like a Roman candle. We’ve got to contain this fire!”

  Navarro nodded. “Figured as much with the way our luck’s been running.”

  Austen tugged the door open.

  Smoke tried to billow out. Instead, it made a bluish-white ripple under the UV lamps as the negative pressure pushed most of the smoke back inside. Flames danced inside the cracked and sagging biosafety cabinets.

  The group made their way inside, hunched over against the heat as if facing a strong wind. Eyes watered under safety glasses. Noses wrinkled with the acrid smells of burning plastics.

  “The samples!” Blaine cried. “They’re all going up in smoke!”

  “I can think of worse things,” Navarro said, nudging the man into action. “Come on! Wall extinguishers!”

  The big man grabbed one off the wall next to him while Blaine moved to pick up the other. Together, the men directed streams of foam over the blackened rectangles of acrylic. Austen crouched down, under the worst of the smoke and heat. She made her way to the environmental controls and reached out to turn the console’s handles.

  “Attendre!” Lelache shouted at her. “Wait!”

  The woman dug in a nearby drawer. She tossed over a sterile cloth towel. Austen ripped open the package and draped the cloth over the metal handles before turning them. Heat rippled through the cloth and her gloves, but it only made her wince before she released her grip.

  A gowned-up Preble and Zhao joined them just as the last flames were smothered. Zhao moved to a panel next to the door and turned on the emergency venting. Blaine set down his extinguisher, found the alarm, and switched it off.

  A blessed silence fell over the room. Lelache knelt to take a look at the environm
ental controls even as Austen stood up and surveyed the damage. The biosafety cabinets slumped where they lay, half-melted by the localized inferno. Their contents lay either in little piles of ash or congealed amidst slushy pools of fire-retardant liquid.

  Her jaw set in a grim line.

  “Are we going to be okay?” Navarro asked bluntly. “This all looks pretty well charcoaled, but if we’ve inhaled something toxic, I want to know.”

  “Fire’s the best sterilizing agent around,” she replied. “And the pathogen only creates enough toxin to kill you if it’s in your bloodstream. You were in more danger from inhaling the off-gassing from the burning plastics in here.”

  “Bloody hell,” Preble murmured. “We’re lucky this didn’t reach the oxygen tanks, or we’d all have joined the choir invisible about now.”

  “We’re lucky indeed,” Lelache said, as she pulled back the sizzling cloth and looked at the handles. “The oxygen drips into the biosafety cabinets were opened all the way to maximum.”

  “You’re kidding!” Austen exclaimed. “That would create a serious fire hazard inside the cabinets with the samples!”

  “It puts fuel and oxygen in the same space,” Navarro said, as he put down his extinguisher. “But what would spark it off?”

  “The lights,” Lelache answered. “The cabinets with the samples were all under direct light so that we can record any Nostocales activity. It’s unlikely, but there could have been a short that set everything off.”

  “Unlikely,” Navarro gritted. “As in, unlikely enough to mean we’re looking at sabotage more than an accident?”

  Austen shook her head. “Hold up on those thoughts.”

  “Why should I? What are the odds that something would just ‘spark’ in here? And what are the odds that no automated sprinkler system went off in here?”

  “This is a mobile lab,” she replied coolly. “Weight’s at a premium. There’s no space for a sprinkler system, let alone water to run through the pipes. Alarms and extinguishers are all we have. As far as that spark goes…everything in these trailers have been jiggled and bashed around the inside an air freight hold for twelve hours just to get here. Equipment in this place is a lot more likely to short out or fail than in a regular lab. And you know better than anyone how dangerous this organism is. Would you chance an exposure just to sabotage this mission?”