Bill ordered the car to drive to the hospital. Once past the security gates, it pulled up to the front of the white-bricked building. Jameson got out first, carrying both his medical bag and a cooler box with the blood samples like a baby. Harvey tried to take the box from him more than once, but Jameson told him to leave it.
Bill followed the pair inside, Ben behind him.
‘What happens now?’ asked Ben.
‘Now we hope this pair can work together.’
The two geneticists’ personalities were like chalk and cheese. Harvey was the dominant alpha, liking things his own way. He guessed that working on the first-gen code and being Charles Deighton’s personal physician had turned him hard and unyielding.
Jameson, a man whom Bill had watched care for a captured Indigene boy eight years ago, seemed to be a softer personality. But when it came to the business of genetics, Jameson could hold his own. He had been Tanya’s personal physician. She’d been as soft as an attack dog.
The men entered the lift together, neither waiting for Bill or Ben to catch up.
‘Sons of bitches,’ Bill muttered when the lift door closed just as they reached it.
Ben pressed the call button, which flashed red. ‘They do that often?’
‘No. I usually get some respect.’ While they waited, Bill asked Ben something. In a low voice, he said, ‘Between you and me, I recorded Harvey visiting our old friend Marcus. You know anything about their relationship on Earth?’
Ben visibly stiffened at his mention of Marcus, but he frowned and shook his head. ‘First time I saw him was on the passenger ship. I didn’t know who he was then. When you asked me to look up information on him, Harvey’s real face flashed up on screen. Still nothing. Whatever he did on Earth while the criminals were in power, it had nothing to do with the neighbourhoods.’ Ben paused. ‘Should I be worried?’
He didn’t want to worry the teen over nothing. ‘No. Marcus isn’t going anywhere for a long time.’
The lift door opened and Bill nudged Ben in first. Arriving on the lower levels, the door opened and Bill marched out of it. He slapped open the double doors of the lab, half expecting to see two bickering scientists at work. But what he found was two doctors working as though they’d been lab partners for years. Harvey was transferring tiny sticks into a clear machine, while the results fed to a screen.
Bill stared at the cryogenic room at the back of the lab that housed the sleeping Conditioned and the Elite. The latter had little time left on this new Earth. Tanya’s stasis pod stood between both sets, as though she commanded her own space.
What have you done to the Nexus, Tanya?
He switched his focus back to the doctors. One was reading information on screen, while the other was removing the analysed samples from a strange analysis machine and inserting new ones. Ben stood in a spot that gave him a good view of the screen. Bill walked up to Jameson, who was fiddling with the strange machine.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an immunoanalyser. It will perform a biochemical analysis on the blood samples we’ve taken and detect the presence of an analyte.’
Bill frowned. ‘Analyte?’
‘Large protein. In this case, the presence of antibodies. If there are any, we’ll know if there’s an infection, and possibly a cause.’
His patience eluded him. ‘So what’s the result?’
‘Calm, Bill.’ Jameson pushed him back gently. ‘We’ve been at this for about three seconds. Wait for Harvey to finish what he’s doing.’
Bill remembered Harvey doing something similar when Laura had gotten ill. Except the machine he’d used was a DNA analyser. While he didn’t fully trust the man, he couldn’t imagine anyone better qualified to figure out this mess.
Five agonising minutes passed. Bill tapped his foot as he waited a further fifteen minutes for Harvey to feed the samples into the machine. One by one, the data from the Elite presented on screen, followed by second and third-gen analysis. The screen displayed a chemical analysis of their blood work. Bill wished he knew more to understand what he was looking at.
Jameson rubbed his chin. Bill couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a bad one.
‘What is it?’ he said, trying to hurry up the thought process.
‘As I feared. It is a virus. A strong one. See here.’ He pointed at an elevated number that Bill assumed was the antibody count. ‘This indicates an infection of some kind. But there’s not enough data to determine what the virus is, or where it came from.’
‘Could the Indigenes’ boosted immune system count for the elevation?’ asked Ben.
‘Possibly.’ Jameson glanced at him. ‘We don’t know what normal looks like in their species. All we have are the samples from today. We’d need old lab samples to compare results.’
‘What about the Elite? What tests did you perform on them? Would any have caused this virus?’
Jameson shrugged. ‘You name it, we did it. But their immune systems have been too severely compromised to know for sure. It would be like comparing apples to oranges.’
Three samples showed on screen. Bill pointed to the one on the left presenting with a higher antibody count. ‘First gen?’ Jameson nodded. ‘And these other two with lower numbers?’
‘Second,’ said Harvey, pointing at the middle, then the right one. ‘Third gen right there. That last sample’s from Serena. We’re not seeing the presence of the virus in any other generation. It seems to be confined to the first gen for now.’
‘For now?’ He worried for Laura’s safety.
‘We don’t know if it will affect the younger Indigenes. Their code will have natural antibodies to fight the strain but we still don’t know where it came from.’
Bill glanced at the Elite. ‘We know.’
Harvey wagged his finger. ‘Not confirmed until we compare samples from the Conditioned and the Elite. Tanya’s mind entered the Nexus using Simon as a vehicle.’
‘The Nexus absorbs energy,’ Bill said. ‘And Simon carried two minds inside.’
Harvey folded his arms. ‘Explain how it works.’
‘The Nexus connects with the consciousness, not the body. The body remains on the outside while the mind transports to a different plane.’
It’s how Stephen had described the experience to him. He’d told him some things about it, but after Tanya’s unplanned visit Bill had forced his friend to explain it in full. Had Laura used it since then?
‘Then what? Why do they use it?’
‘To heal.’
‘Mind or body?’
Bill didn’t see how that mattered. ‘Both, I guess.’
‘You guess or you know?’
‘I know. It’s both.’ The Indigenes also used it to heal physically.
Harvey unfolded his arms. ‘The Nexus may not connect with the body directly, but there is a connection. It’s possible a GS virus may have been passed through that connection. The Elite were not strong, physically. They were—are—more prone to diseases.’
‘Tanya was subjected to a lot of testing, so that could have introduced something,’ said Jameson, continuing his analysis on screen.
Bill saw that he’d removed the samples of second and third gen from screen to leave only the first-gen ones. He pulled up two new samples, one for the Conditioned and the one for the Elite.
‘I took these samples from our guests yesterday.’
Bill saw the sample from the Elite had deteriorated. ‘No luck in stopping the degradation?’
Jameson shook his head.
Harvey took a closer look. ‘Have you tried lengthening the telomeres?’
Jameson frowned. ‘The telomeres should be strong. Their mutations guaranteed it.’
One screen showed DNA strands. Harvey pointed to a distinctive structure in the chain. ‘Here, at the ends of the chromosomes. The telomere may be shortening too fast. It’s hard to say what your experiments on the board members did to them. We boosted production of telomerase in the Indigenes, to rebuild the telomeres and to give them infinite cell division. Not only in the Indigenes—we use that technique in the genetic manipulation clinics to prolong life. In your mutation, it’s possible your rigorous testing weakened the telomeres.’
Jameson’s nod gave Bill hope.
‘Using the machine and the stolen Nexus energy to heal their bodies might have triggered new changes within them,’ said the doctor.
‘Check if that’s the case and fix it,’ suggested Harvey.
Jameson nodded again, eyes on the screen. He pointed suddenly. ‘See those?’
Bill went in for a closer look, but it all looked the same to him.
Harvey also pointed at the sample on the right, showing a dark tissue sample from one of the Conditioned. It appeared to have cell damage. ‘Slight variations in the DNA code, but this could be something.’
‘Does that mean the Conditioned had the virus?’ asked Bill.
Jameson said, ‘This is a sample from Simon, post-mortem.’ Tanya’s host body. ‘It’s hard to compare living with dead, but anomalies in the cells could indicate the presence of a strain. It could also be nothing.’
‘And if it’s nothing?’
Jameson locked his gaze on Bill. ‘It means the virus is not from either Tanya or Simon. We could be dealing with a new source.’