“This is the first time you had anything to compare it with.”
“Sweet smoking Jesus, Ken. You’re not much of a team player, are you?” At least it answered one question: now she knew why these two had hung around for so long.
“It’s not a counteragent,” Laurie said, as if to gird her against inevitable disappointment.
Taka called up the new sequence. “So I see.” She shook her head. “It’s not our mystery bug either.”
“Really?” Laurie looked surprised. “You can tell that after five seconds?”
“It looks like ßehemoth.”
“It’s not,” Ken assured her.
“Maybe a new strain, then. I’d have to grind through the whole sequence to be sure, but I can tell just by looking that it’s an RNA bug.”
“The biosol isn’t?”
“I don’t know what it is. It’s a nucleic acid of some kind, but the sugar’s got a four-carbon ring. I’ve never seen it before and it doesn’t seem to be in any of Miri’s cheat sheets. I’m going to have to take it from scratch.”
A look passed between Ken and Laurie. It spoke volumes, but not to her.
“Don’t let us stop you,” Ken said.
Miri could identify known diseases, and cure those for which cures had been found. It could generate random variants of the usual targeted antibiotics, and prescribe regimens that might keep ahead of your average bug’s ability to evolve countermeasures. It could fix broken bones, excise tumors, and heal all manner of physical trauma. When it came to ßehemoth it was little more than a palliative center on wheels, of course, but even that was better than nothing. All in all, the MI was a miracle of modern medical technology—but it was a field hospital, not a research lab. It could sequence novel genomes, as long as the template was familiar, but that wasn’t what it had been built for.
Genomes based on unfamiliar templates were another thing entirely. This bug wasn’t DNA or RNA—not even the primitive, barely-helical variant of RNA that ßehemoth hung its hat on. It was something else altogether, and Miri’s database had never been designed to deal with anything like it.
Taka didn’t give a damn. She made it do that anyway.
She found the template easily enough once she looked beyond the nuts-and-bolts sequencing routines. It was right there in a dusty corner of the biomed encyclopedia: TNA. A threose-based nucleic acid first synthesized back at the turn of the century. The usual bases attached to a threose sugar-phosphate backbone, with phosphodiester bonds connecting the nucleotides. Some early theoretical work had suggested that it might have played a vital role back when life was still getting started, but everyone had pretty much forgotten about it after the Martian Panspermians won the day.
A novel template meant novel genes. The standard reference database was virtually useless. Decoding the new sequence with the tools in Miri’s arsenal was like digging a tunnel with a teaspoon: you could do it, but you had to be really motivated. Fortunately Taka had motivation up to here. She dug in, knowing it would just take time, and maybe a few unavoidable detours down blind alleys.
Too much time. Way too many detours. And what bugged Taka was, she knew the answer already. She’d known almost before she’d started. Every painstaking, laborious, mind-numbing test supported it. Every electrophoretic band, every virtual blot, every PCR and TTD—all these haphazard techniques stapled together hour after bloody hour—they all pointed, glacially, implacably, to the same glorious answer.
And it was a glorious answer. So after three days, tired of the endless triple-checks and replicates, she decided to just go with what she had. She presented her findings near midday back at the cove, for privacy and the convenience of a ready charge.
“It’s not just a tweak job,” she told the rifters. A lone bedraggled gull picked its way among the stones. “It’s a totally artificial organism, designed from scratch. And it was designed to outcompete ßehemoth on its own turf. It’s got a TNA template, which is fairly primitive, but it also uses small RNA’s in a way that ßehemoth never did—that’s an advanced trait, a eukaryotic trait. It uses proline for catalysis. A single amino acid doing the job of a whole enzyme—do you have any idea how much space that saves—?”
No. They didn’t. The blank looks made that more than obvious.
She cut to the chase. “The bottom line, my friends, is if you throw this little guy into culture with ßehemoth it’ll come out the winner every time.”
“In culture,” Ken repeated.
“No reason to think it won’t do the same in the wild. Remember, it was designed to make its own way in the world; the plan was obviously to just dump it into the system as an aerosol and leave it to its own devices.”
Ken grunted, scrolling through Taka’s results on the main display. “What’s this?”
“What? Oh, yeah. It’s polyploid.”
“Polyploid?” Laurie repeated.
“You know, haploid, diploid, polyploid. Multiple sets of genes. You mostly see it in some plants.”
“Why here?” Ken wondered.
“I found some nasty recessives,” Taka admitted. “Maybe they were deliberately inserted because of some positive effect they’d have in concert with other genes, or maybe it was a rush job so they just slipped through. As far as I can tell the redundant genes were just layered on to eliminate any chance of homozygous expression.”
He grunted. “Not very elegant.”
Taka shook her head, impatient. “Certainly it’s a ham-fisted solution, but it’s quick and—I mean, the point is it works! We could beat ßehemoth!”
“If you’re right,” Ken mused, “it’s not ßehemoth you have to beat.”
“The M&M’s,” Taka suggested.
Something changed in Laurie’s stance.
Ken looked unconvinced. “Possibly. Although the counterstrikes appear to originate with the North American defense shield.”
“CSIRA,” Laurie said quietly.
Ken shrugged. “At this point, CSIRA effectively is the armed forces on this continent. And there don’t appear to be much in the way of centralized governments left to keep it in check.”
“Shouldn’t matter,” Taka said. “’lawbreakers are incorruptible.”
“Maybe they were, before Rio. Now, who knows?”
“No.” Taka saw scorched landscapes. She remembered lifters on the horizon, breathing fire. “We take our orders from them. We all—”
“Then it’s probably just as well you kept this project so close to your chest,” Lubin remarked.
“But why would anyone—” Laurie was looking from Taka to Ken, disbelief written across her face. “I mean, what would be in it for them?”
More than confusion, Taka realized. Loss, too. Anguish. Something clicked at the back of her mind: Laurie hadn’t really believed it, all this time. She had helped where she could. She had cared. She had accepted Taka’s interpretation of events—at least as a possibility—because it had offered her an opportunity to help set things right. And yet, only now did she seem to realize what that interpretation entailed, the large-scale implications of what it was they were fighting: not ßehemoth after all, but their own kind.
Odd, Taka reflected, how often it comes down to that...
It wasn’t just the end of the world, not to Laurie. It seemed somehow more—more intimate than that. It was almost as if someone had betrayed her personally. Welcome back, Taka thought to the vulnerable creature peeking again, at long last, from behind the mask. I’ve missed you.