“The signal dampener all but halts the spread of the crystalline substance,” Babitz said. “The dampeners were made to cut off the Shedai from whatever drives them. Whatever that stuff is, it’s part of the Shedai—and we can shut it down.”
“Excellent work, Doctor,” Nassir said.
She grinned sheepishly. “I can’t take the credit, sir.”
“Thank me,” Terrell called out over the still-open comm channel. “I was the one who asked why I wasn’t dead yet.”
Hearing his friend’s voice coaxed a smile from Nassir. “Good work, Clark. Way to beat the odds.”
“It’s a living.”
The captain turned to Babitz. “Doctor, now that we know the dampeners affect the crystalline virus, can we exploit that somehow? Neutralize it? Reverse it?”
Babitz and Tan Bao traded conspiratorial grins. “We’re already working on it, sir.”
“That’s it,” Babitz said to Tan Bao, forcing herself away from the electron microscope viewer. “I need a break.”
Her eyes burned from staring at computer screens. The hours had passed swiftly as she and Tan Bao lost themselves in the mystery of the Taurus meta-genome and its link to the crystalline virus. They had taken turns running tests, analyzing the results, and comparing their new data to what had been collected during Dr. Fisher’s autopsy of a Shedai. There had proved to be as many parallels as there were divergences.
After peering for hours into the intense emerald glow of the microscope’s shielded display, Babitz’s vision had to readjust to the dim illumination in the sickbay. The ship was running on very low power to conserve its emergency batteries. Most of the power being used on the Sagittarius at that moment was consumed by the computers and analyzers in sickbay; letting Babitz make such intense demands on the ship’s dwindling energy resources had been a calculated risk by Captain Nassir. She was determined not to make him regret his gamble.
Tan Bao watched numbers and gauges shift on a screen as the analyzer concluded another round of subatomic scrutiny on samples of the crystalline substance. Dejected, he sighed and said, “Nothing, Doctor. Just more of what we already know.”
“We must be missing something,” Babitz said. She got up, stretched, and twisted a crick out of her back. Then she walked over to stand beside McLellan, who lay sedated on a biobed. “Tan,” she said, “join me. Let’s just stop for a minute.”
He swept his long, thick black hair from his face as he got up. His eyes were bloodshot. “I feel like we just keep running over the same old ground,” he said. “I don’t understand why the substance’s anabolic activity petered out so quickly in Vanguard’s lab, but here it just keeps on moving.”
“Living tissue, for one thing,” Babitz said, recalling Dr. Fisher’s report. “The computer models predicted that this virus would consume a humanoid in a matter of minutes.” She frowned. “Which makes its much slower progress here confusing. I also can’t figure out why Vanguard’s samples became inert within minutes of being deprived of living tissue to interact with, but the samples we found on Bridy Mac’s leg remained active even when the flesh began to decay.”
Tan Bao stared at the signal dampener in McLellan’s lap. “We were using the signal dampener from almost the minute she got hit till we got back to the ship, which has its own dampening field. If that’s what’s slowing this stuff down, then whatever makes it spread has to be external,” he said. “And if the Shedai signal is boosting its activity, that might explain why it’s still active on a dead limb…. That’s the only reason I can think of that the dampener would make any difference.”
Pieces of the puzzle began to fit together in Babitz’s imagination. “Do you remember what Xiong said about the Shedai carrier wave that was sent from here? He said it contained strings of data that matched chemical sequences common to all samples of the meta-genome.” She rubbed the tips of her index fingers against her thumbs, a nervous habit that asserted itself when her concentration was focused. “What if that signal is what sustains the crystalline virus?”
“That would explain why the dampener impedes it,” said Tan Bao. “But is it just an energizing field? Or something else?”
Remembering more of Xiong’s briefing from six days earlier, Babitz started formulating a plan. “Xiong also said that his team had replicated the carrier-wave signal and used it to pinpoint other planets of interest. How would that have worked?”
“They must have identified the part of the signal that provoked responses from the artifacts on the planets,” Tan Bao said. In a flash, he caught up with Babitz’s line of reasoning. “So if we figure out what part of the signal the virus reacts to, we can modify it and send our own signal to neutralize it.”
Reinvigorated, Babitz left McLellan’s bedside and moved to one of the computer stations. Tan Bao followed her. She asked, “Have you finished sequencing the virus’s genome?”
“Yes,” he said, entering commands at his own console. Based on the files he was accessing, Babitz knew that he had anticipated her next order. “Use Xiong’s algorithm for translating the sequence into a Shedai carrier-wave signal.”
“I’m all over it,” Tan Bao said. His fingers tapped in a blur, calling up data and executing commands on the computer. “Computer’s translating the sequence now.”
Keeping up with him wasn’t easy. “When it’s done, I’ll search for that signal pattern in the Shedai carrier wave,” she said. “First, I’ll see if Xiong’s people identified any command triggers in the signal.”
The computer banks hummed with activity, their volume and pitch rising slowly in step with Babitz’s excitement. We’re close, she told herself. I can feel it. She felt warm and a little bit dizzy. Palming a light sheen of perspiration from her forehead, she waited anxiously for the computer’s results.
“I’ve isolated a set of trigger sequences,” she said.
He replied, “We have a signal pattern for the virus.”
“Running the search routine,” Babitz said. “If we’re lucky, we might find a partial match somewhere in the—” A shrill tone from the computer cut her off. She checked the display, then checked it again, stunned at her good luck. “We have a match.”
Tan Bao leaned forward and eyed the results. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s not just any match—it’s a perfect match. The whole pattern.” He pointed at the screen. “Ahead of it and after it—are those trigger sequences?”
Babitz was unsure. “Possibly,” she said. “They have a few chromosomes in common with other triggers in the meta-genome, but I don’t think these have been documented before.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to believe Xiong’s team didn’t find the virus’s genome in the signal.”
“None of their samples of the virus lasted long enough to be gene-mapped,” Tan Bao said.
“How do we apply this? Couple the virus’s signal with a trigger we don’t understand? How do we test it?”
After pondering the issue a moment, Tan Bao said, “We could run tests on the severed part of Bridy Mac’s leg. See if we can neutralize the crystalline substance without affecting the tissue underneath.” He reacted to Babitz’s dubious look by adding, “It’s a lot safer than testing it on Bridy Mac, and a lot more useful than testing microscopic samples.”
“Fine,” Babitz said. “Set it up on bed two.” Even though McLellan’s severed appendage had been in stasis all this time, the odds of it being viable for surgical reattachment were all but nonexistent at this point. If using it as a test sample made it possible to save McLellan’s life, and maybe also Terrell’s, then it would be a worthwhile sacrifice.
She watched Tan Bao remove the leg from storage and set it on the sickbay’s other biobed. He welcomed her help setting up an array of automated surgical implements and modified scanners directly above the bed. As he made the final adjustments to the equipment, Babitz watched with fascination and fear as the sparkling crystalline texture crept slowly across the necrotizing limb.