Chapter 8

The lure, the lore of the hidden. Every side of refractory matter splitting light. A deep blaze waiting to surface . . .

—Madeline DeFrees

 

Marte Chang heard the whoosh-swoosh of incoming air as the tray behind her opened and closed the positive-pressure pump. She smelled fresh coffee and chicken soup.

Feeding time, she thought. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, peeled off her headset and gloveware. How long has it been since I’ve had coffee?

She felt for the cup in the tray behind her, and watched the viroids she’d been studying fade from red to orange to black behind her eyelids. She felt wide awake, but her eyes were gritty and her shoulders knotted like fists. And her right hip throbbed where the buckle of her seat belt had caught her in the Mongoose crash.

Marte would not have slept, anyhow. Not after what she’d seen, and heard, and smelled out at ViraVax. The coffee was a luxury, one stage of freedom, a promise that there was more to come. She had been locked up at ViraVax for two months; a few more days in this isolette wouldn’t bother her much.

Except I’m so close, she thought. We could be moving to production now if we were at a good lab.

Marte heard some of the ruckus that Sonja and Harry raised in their cubicles. They saved her life, and she couldn’t let them down now. Marte left ViraVax with nothing but her life—Harry had thought to grab for some data on his way out the door. They were young yet, those two, and righteous indignation was a privilege of youth.

She knew all too well how they felt. It was just how she’d felt when those automatic doors at ViraVax whooshed closed behind her that first time. And again, when she found the human experiments that Dajaj Mishwe had boxed up so neatly at Level Five. She had wanted to scream every night, but she had her own prison to maintain on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Marte trembled now, not with caffeine, but with the emotional blowup that bubbled inside her.

I hope I can nip this fuse before I lose it

Marte desperately hunted the combination of proteins, amino acids and free radicals that would get all three of them out of the zoo. She couldn’t do that if she went to pieces now.

She took a deep breath, then rotated her neck as she let the breath trickle slowly out her left nostril first, then her right. This was a trick of focus that her mother had taught her.

“Are you there, Major?” Marte asked, her eyes closed.

Her speaker hissed, and Major Ezra Hodge said, “Coffee, I see. They told me you were a Gardener, but of course Children of Eden don’t drink coffee, and, obviously, you do.”

Marte bumped her tray as she turned, and sloshed some bean soup onto the floor.

“But the chicken broth is made without chickens,” Hodge added, “in case you’re interested. A miracle of your own technology, I believe.”

“I’m sorry,” Marte said. This Ezra Hodge gave her a cold-belly feeling. “I thought you were Major Scholz.”

“We met briefly last night,” he reminded her, and manufactured a smile. “Major Hodge, Ezra Hodge. I’m sorry we can’t shake hands.”

Marte didn’t like the way his eyes pinned her to her chair like some exotic bug. And he didn’t look sorry at all. He looked greasy, and puffy, and even though she really wanted a man, she really didn’t want this one.

“You’re wasting my time,” she said, and turned back to her console.

“You have to eat,” Hodge said. “And there’s your coffee, of course. We can chat while you—”

“I can think while I eat,” she said. “I can’t chat and eat. Not while you’ve got me in here. Get lost.”

Marte touched a key on her console, and steel drum reggae drowned out his feeble squawking.

She ordered her computer, “Volume, up two,” just in case.

Marte’s soup was just cool enough to eat when Harry’s signal, an orange comet, streaked across her vision.

“Voice,” she said. Then, “Harry, did they give you mock chicken soup, too?”

“Yeah,” her speaker said, “and EdenSprings water. I’m not touching anything made by the Gardeners. From now on, I’ll stick to Coke for the rest of my life.”

She laughed.

“That’s the safest bet,” she said. “I’m living dangerously and having a coffee.”

“The chicken broth will get us, you’ll see.”

“Are we out of here yet?” she tossed back.

Her speaker was silent for a moment.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “Incoming files on our GenoVax problem. They’ve been blown; I’ll have to defrag and collate them before sending them to you.”

“ ‘Blown’? You mean, somebody else has seen them?”

“No,” Harry said. “Mr. Bartlett created the files, blew them into fragments, then mixed them up and stored them in various addresses. One fragment is an assembler. When activated, it brings the others together. It was the simplest trick that would give him the best results.”

“Was that something else you taught him?”

Another pause. Marte drank off her coffee and sipped her soup right out of the bowl.

“Yeah,” her speaker said. “I taught Mr. Bartlett and my dad a lot of tricks on the web, which is one way my dad always found me so easily.”

“You could have made that impossible, though, couldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I could. His stupid little messages . . . well, at least he kept trying to stay in touch.”

“Sonja told me he used to stay in touch by beating you.”

“Sonja had no business telling you about that,” Harry said. “He wasn’t always that way. I try to remember him before that. If he makes it . . . maybe things will be different.”

“Things?”

“Well, I don’t mean like my parents getting back together, or me living with him again, or anything like that,” Harry said. “I mean, maybe he got it out of his system. I’d like to see him happy again, but I still wouldn’t want to live with him. I’d like to get my own place now. Okay, here comes your feed. Good luck.”

“Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for talking to me.”

Static. Marte tipped her soup bowl up and chugged it.

“Thanks for listening,” her speaker said. “I shouldn’t waste your time.”

“Never,” she said. “Talk anytime.”

Then he was gone; Marte could feel it. Or not feel it. What did she feel with the young Harry Toledo that was so noticeably absent without him?

Happy.

Uh-oh, Marte thought, he’s just a kid.

He was just a kid, but he’d saved her life. She readjusted her headset, stretched her aching muscles again and sighed.

The idle brain is the devil’s playground.

The GenoVax directory opened in front of her, and she moved to the customary abstracts to give herself an overview. Marte wondered how Harry had found the proper addresses for the blown files. She wanted to learn how to do that: search out anything or anyone on the nets and webs. If they got out of this, maybe he would teach her.

Marte twisted and untwisted her long black hair in her ungloved left hand while her right navigated through the ViraVax studies related to Artificial Viral Agents—specifically, “teams” of AVAs acting as smugglers, initiators and assemblers of microtubule expressways and biological engines within the cells.

This thing is set up to work fast, she thought. A multisystem assault on the whole body,

Any human being who had been vaccinated for anything over the past ten years was infected; ViraVax had seen to that. The cascade effect of the AVAs had to be stopped early in the process, so she concentrated on the supply lines, the microtubules, and the basic initiator-type structures.

Once I identify these triggers, she thought, we still have to manufacture and distribute the blocking mechanism,

Marte heard her mother’s voice in the back of her head, urging her, “Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can.”

So she didn’t.