Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14) Read online

  Zage looked very excited, “Okay! What’ll I be doing research on? Can it be something I want to study?”

  Ell snorted, “It’ll be what she wants you to work on. You’ll have plenty of time to study what you’re interested in after you’ve learned what she can teach you.” Ell turned serious, “I want you to understand that Duke thinks of this as just a few classes you’re going to be taking, not something that’ll lead to a degree. I’m pretty sure they really think of this as just a favor they’re going to be doing for Ell Donsaii and not at all something they expect you to succeed at.”

  “Do I need a degree?”

  Ell shrugged, “I guess not.”

  Zage leaned forward and gave her a big hug, “Thanks Mom, I really appreciate this.”

  She leaned back and said, “Unfortunately, we’re still not done with the serious stuff. If you’re going to be traveling over to Duke University to take classes and work in the lab, keeping you safe’s going to be more difficult.”

  “Oh Mom, you worry too…”

  “Don’t tell me not to worry.” Ell interrupted, “You just got kidnapped last month!”

  “Okay…” Zage said resignedly. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Several plans. First of all, you remember how we introduced you to Steve and the security team that watches over us back in December, right?” At Zage’s nod, Ell continued, “Steve’s hiring more people and some of them will be following you wherever you go. Not into classrooms or the lab, but they’ll be hanging around outside of them. Osprey’ll be able to reach them if anything happens and they’ll be close enough to help right away.”

  “Okay,” Zage said. In view of the fact that his kidnapping had been kind of scary, having people like Steve hanging around nearby sounded good. More importantly, it wouldn’t waste any of his own time.

  “And, I want you to take some self-defense classes.”

  “You mean like karate?”

  “Yeah, though Steve likes a mix of different martial arts, not just one. He signed you up with a school here in town and he’ll be teaching you some things himself.”

  “Okay.” Zage frowned, “is this going to take much time?”

  “An hour a week at the class and as much additional time as Steve thinks he needs.”

  Dismayed, Zage said, “For how long?!”

  Ell shook her head and grinned at Zage’s distress, “For as long as it’s needed, then a while longer. There’ll be other young kids in these classes so I’m counting on that to be your chance to socialize with your own age group. The classes at Duke’ll be your chance to socialize with college age people.”

  “Mom! I get along fine with people already!”

  Ell laughed, “Only when I badger you to actually talk to them. I’m pretty sure if I left you alone you’d be a hermit in no time!”

  Zage rolled his eyes, “Okay.” He took a deep breath, then said, “I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful. I really do appreciate you setting this up for me.”

  “One more thing that you’re not going to like…?”

  Zage sighed, “What is it?”

  “I want to install a one ended port in some of the fat below your belly button.”

  “One ended port?”

  Ell explained one ended ports. “So, if you’d had one when you were kidnapped, I could’ve sent you a high-end GPS antenna and tracker. Kind of whatever might happen to you, Allan could at least deliver some devices or materials to help you out.”

  “It wouldn’t help if someone was just attacking to hurt me.”

  Ell gave him a level look, “I could shoot Tasers or drugs through the port at them.”

  “Oh…” Zage thought for a moment, “Is that legal?”

  “If I need to do it to save my son’s life, I don’t care if it’s legal.”

  “Oh… Is it going to hurt?”

  Ell slowly nodded. “I can send in some anesthetic first, if you like?”

  “Okay…” Zage said slowly. “Can we do it on Saturday?”

  Ell blinked, then slowly said, “Yes… but waiting won’t make it hurt any less. In my experience it’s just as well to get these things over with.”

  “It’s just that… I’ve been doing these new exercises that make my stomach sore. I don’t think I want you shooting things into it when it’s already hurting.”

  “Okay, Saturday,” Ell put out her hand for a shake.

  Zage shook her hand, understanding it was a way to signify agreement but thinking it was a weird thing to do. I’ll have to move my peptide injections from my stomach to my thighs for the next few days. Hopefully the bruises’ll be gone by Saturday.

  ***

  Ell sat down at the ETR (Extra Terrestrial Resources) meeting and to her astonishment realized that Phil Zabrisk sat several seats down from her. “Phil? What’re you doing here?”

  Phil just grinned at her but Ben Stavos leaned forward and said, “We invited him. He’s had an idea we think we should talk about here. That’s why Gary’s here too; this brainstorm requires huge quantities of graphene.”

  Ell glanced over to where Gary Pace sat. She’d noticed him before, but at the time she hadn’t registered it as unusual. Gary didn’t usually come to ETR meetings, but she saw him a lot so his presence didn’t stand out like Phil’s did. “Okay, shall we talk about this new idea before we move on to our other business?”

  Phil glanced around the table, “As quite a few of you know, Lindy Thompson’s experiment with the inflatable graphene dome on Mars is working pretty well. The dome has water from Europa in the bottom of it. Its atmosphere’s made of CO2 from Venus and nitrogen from the atmosphere of Titan. She inoculated the water with cyanobacteria; the kind of organisms that are believed to have initially generated Earth’s oxygen atmosphere. Heat and light comes from a solar parabolic mirror at the top of the dome. For a while the cyanobacteria looked pretty sick in that environment. This was probably partly because of all the radiation, but also because the CO2 levels were so much higher than they’ve been on earth for hundreds of millions of years. However, the cyanobacteria appear to have undergone a spontaneous mutation that made them more tolerant. Since then they’ve pretty much been cranking out the O2. Our astronauts could actually live in the dome without spacesuits if it wasn’t for the radiation.”

  There were some excited questions from several of the people at the table who weren’t aware of what’d been happening, but once everyone was up to speed, Gary asked, “So what’s your plan? Allosci’s making another dome already Are you wanting to us to make a bunch of them?”

  Ben opened a hand toward Phil and, taking the cue, Phil said, “As I’m sure most of you realize, the endgame would be to terraform Mars, but moving enough carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water to Mars to make the entire planet livable would take decades even if we made the enormous investments it’d require to open thousands of extremely large ports. Setting up a bunch of domes like Gary just suggested could provide environments with livable atmospheres but we’d still have the radiation problem…” He paused to let this sink in, “My idea was to cover the Valles Marineris with layers of graphene…”

  Ell queried Allan to determine what the area of the Valles was but Gary’d already interrupted Phil, “Oh my God! Making that dome was already pushing the limits of what we can do and it’s only a kilometer in diameter! The Valles has to be way bigger.”

  Ell gave a little laugh, “650,000 square kilometers!”

  Gary snorted, then laughed, “Yeah, that’d take us at least a week or two.” He turned to Phil, “Right now, the widest we can roll out sheet graphene is two meters. We can join the edges of the sheets with a slight overlap, which is what we did to make the dome, but it isn’t trivial. I hope you can imagine that covering the Valles might even take months.” He looked up into the air for a second of thought, then said, “Actually, it took us six months to make that one kilometer dome, but we should be able to scale up fairly easily to do one a month so… 650,000 months’d be…�
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  “About 5400 years,” Ell said, “and that’s ignoring the fact that a one kilometer diameter dome isn’t actually a square kilometer. I guess we’d really have to scale up, huh?”

  “Maybe just part of the Valles,” Phil said a little weakly.

  Ell turned to him, “Why cover the Valles rather than just putting up domes? We could put up domes anywhere on Mars that we wanted. Not just the Valles.”

  “Well, one thing’d be that you could make the graphene cover over the valley in a couple of layers with a meter of water between them. The water’d serve as protection from both radiation and small meteorites.”

  “Why not do that in a dome?”

  Phil shrugged, “The water’d tend to run down into the sides and leave the top of it uncovered.”

  Ell said, “You’re going to have to have a cellular structure with each cell filled by its own port anyway. If you suspended your graphene layers across the Valles, the water’d all run to the center and leave the edges uncovered.”

  Phil shook his head, “The air pressure underneath it’d hold it up.”

  Ell narrowed her eyes for a moment’s thought, then it was her turn to shake her head, “Even high altitude air pressure would be way too high. Against a vacuum, even the pressure at 10,000 feet would exert around eight metric tons per square meter, but your cubic meter of water only weighs one metric ton on earth and 0.38 tons on Mars. Your membrane over the Valles would bulge up and the water’d all run to the sides. It isn’t really a problem though, it just means you have to have a cellular structure to hold the water where you want it to be. And, you can do that in a regular dome like Lindy’s…” She paused and thought for a moment, then said, “I think you’ve had a great idea, it’s just that we’ve got to start small. The Valles is way smaller than all of Mars, but it’s still ridiculously big.”

  “But a dome’s so small!”

  “Come on Phil! A one kilometer dome has nearly 200 acres under it. We could put up domes one at a time and connect them together into a city. Settlers could live on the surface of Mars—which I agree would be way cooler than living underground. A meter of water only absorbs about fifty percent of the light passing through it, so people’d even be able to see outside. Also, if a meteor took out one dome, it wouldn’t take out everybody, just the people in that dome.”

  Phil gave her a hangdog look, “You’re always crushing my dreams!”

  Ell snorted, “Don’t make me hit you with my purse. We’ll get to your dreams, just not this year.”

  Around the table quite a few people looked at one another, wondering what the “hit you with my purse” comment meant. Most of them had never seen Ell with a purse. Gary said, “If we’re serious about doing this, I better start trying to figure out how to scale up sheet graphene production.”

  Ell gave him a bright smile, “Great idea.” She turned to Phil, “Since you’re on the injured reserves, maybe you could put in some time trying to come up with a design for a Mars city we can build one dome at a time?”

  Phil got a mulish expression, “I want you to port me back to Mars.”

  “Hah!” Ell said with a grin, “I knew getting ported here in the first place lowered your IQ, I just didn’t know it was this much.”

  “Come on, they’ve just finished testing my IQ twenty ways from Sunday. This’s the perfect opportunity to ship me back out there and give me all those tests again to see how much of a problem it actually is.”

  Ell lifted an eyebrow, “Wow! It took your IQ all the way down to ‘guinea pig?’”

  Phil snorted, “Yeah, so it wouldn’t even be a ‘human subject’ experiment, right?”

  Ell glanced around at the others, “Maybe we shouldn’t make all these nice people listen to us bicker about this. How about if just you and I duke it out after the rest of the meeting’s done?”

  “Okay,” Phil said, then continued with a sly look, “as long as you don’t bring your purse.”

  Ben glanced back and forth between them, then said, “What’s the deal with the purse?”

  “We could tell you… but then we’d have to kill you…”

  ***

  Dr. Tigner looked up and saw Mary hovering outside her office door. “What is it Mary?”

  “Those samples from the weird lesions on Little Diomede island?”

  Tigner nodded.

  “Um, they’re growing out a virus. I’ve PCR’d it but it isn’t matching anything in our database. I think we’ve got to send the sequence to CDC.”

  “Does the system say it’s similar to anything in the database?”

  “Um, the closest things are the orthopoxviruses, but it isn’t really homologous to any of them.”

  Tigner’d heard of orthopoxviruses, but couldn’t bring to mind exactly what they were so she spoke to her AI and looked over at a screen. A list of ten species popped up and her eyes scrolled down it, suddenly catching on smallpox. “Holy crap!” she breathed. Probably the most famous thing about Little Diomede Island was the fact that it was close enough for people on it to see Russia’s Big Diomede Island. The Russians were well known to have created weaponized versions of smallpox back during the Cold War. They’d even had an accidental or possibly intentional release of it at Aralsk in 1971. Everyone infected with that agent had died! A weaponized version of smallpox would be similar to but not homologous to the orthopoxviruses. She raised her eyes to study Mary, “Has anybody but you worked with that sample?”

  Mary shook her head, suddenly looking worried. She obviously hadn’t looked up the orthopoxviruses until now, but must’ve seen smallpox on Tigner’s screen. “Are you… are you thinking it might be smallpox?”

  Tigner shook her head slowly while chewing her lip and thinking furiously. “No, it isn’t smallpox, but if someone’s created a modified version of smallpox, it might be even worse. Have you had any breaks in technique?”

  Mary shook her head, looking uncertain, “No, not that I know of. But…”

  Tigner knew what she meant, you could never be 100 percent sure that your sterile technique had been perfect. “Okay, I’m almost certainly overreacting, but I want you to go freeze down one sample with ‘extreme biohazard’ written all over it. Before you freeze it, thoroughly wipe it down with disinfectant. Any other small items that might be contaminated—just drop them right into a tub of chlorine bleach. Wipe down your entire work area. Do anything else you can think of to disinfect the area. Send me the sequence and write down a list of everybody you’ve had contact with since you started working on it. Then stay there in your lab until I can get one of the infectious disease docs to find a place to isolate you. Meanwhile, I’ll call the CDC and ask them what to do. Once I’ve done that I’ll call out to Little Diomede and find out if the people with the lesions have gotten really sick or not. As soon as I confirm that they’re actually okay, I’ll let you know and we’ll both breathe a big sigh of relief, but in the meantime we need to be taking all precautions, okay?”

  Mary nodded, but the tears welling in her eyes told Tigner she wasn’t really okay. She understood as well as anyone that the most important thing they could do was isolate her, and that was to protect everybody else, not her. If she had a weaponized version of smallpox she was probably going to die.

  Tigner wanted to go give Mary a hug, but that would be crazy. Instead she tried to give her a reassuring smile, “Hey, don’t get too upset. There’re some antivirals that kill smallpox now. If this’s some kind of old Russian weapon, it was probably created back before they started coming up with all the antiviral agents we have nowadays. If it’s bad juju, we’ll get you treatment, don’t worry.”

  Mary nodded and left her doorway, still looking terribly frightened.

  As she should be, Tigner thought grimly.

  Chapter Three

  “Ueda-sensei?”

  “Yes Mark?”

  Mark indicated a chubby boy standing next to him, “This’s our new student, Zage.”

  “Thank you Mark,” Ue
da said, thinking that the pudgy child looked like the kind of kid who got beat up by his classmates. Probably his parents were hoping to stop some bullying by giving the boy confidence enough to protect himself. He looked back at Mark, “If you’ll take him over, introduce him to the others and get started, I’ll be over in a while.”

  Mark was one of Ueda’s junior senseis. Ueda didn’t usually teach beginners himself, though he made an effort to participate briefly in their early classes to set the tone and to make them feel like they had the attention of a senior sensei.

  By the time Ueda got over to the beginners’ class they’d finished their stretching and were practicing basic kicks. As usual, most of them looked really clumsy, but then Ueda’s eyes caught on the pudgy kid who’d just started that day. Although he was several lessons behind the others, he looked… much more coordinated. A kid as young as he appeared to be typically moved in an ungainly fashion, so the graceful way the child moved had Ueda narrowing his eyes and watching him for a couple of minutes. Finally, he gave a mental shrug. That kid’s taken lessons somewhere else, he decided.

  Then Mark saw Ueda standing to the side and called the class to attention so Ueda could make a few points…

  ***

  The Imam narrowed his eyes. “You want to release a disease that you believe’s going to kill millions, possibly billions of people?!”

  Hamza curled his lip, “Infidels. Billions of infidels.”

  “And you believe that Allah wants us to kill all nonbelievers?”

  Hamza shrugged, thinking, I thought this Imam was weak. He said, “It’ll be the ultimate weapon in our Holy War. After all the centuries of treachery we’ll finally get revenge! ”