Generation of vipers fir.., p.37
Generation of Vipers (First Contact), page 37
An explosion rocks the building. Smoke blurs the view through the thin glass panel in the fire door. Dust billows within the stairwell. The snipers peer down their sights. Fingers rest beside the trigger guards, ready to slip in and squeeze the thin curved metal when needed.
Jackson mutters, “One.”
Less than twenty seconds later, there’s another earth-shattering explosion. The SEALs ready themselves, waiting for the third explosion. After that, it’s going to get messy. Kath, though, isn’t worried. She knows there won’t be a third explosion. The others may not believe it, but she’s seen enough of these creatures to understand their predatory behavior. They prefer to lie in ambush rather than chase their prey. Suffering losses is not in their nature. They’re not like ants, bees or wasps which are willing to sacrifice themselves for the hive. To Kath’s mind, the closest analog on Earth would be a jaguar. These things hide in the shadows. They want a clean kill without the possibility of injury.
Kath heads for the lab. Large signs adorn the walls outside the anteroom airlock, providing clear instructions on the process of ingress. There’s a warning about federal laws and unauthorized entry along with a bunch of surveillance cameras, but there’s no breach.
“Nothing got out of here,” Nolan says, confirming her thoughts.
She peers in through the double-glazed reinforced glass windows in the sliding door. The anteroom is full of positive-pressure suits hanging on racks. Three-foot-high yellow arrows on one wall all point in the same direction, indicating this room is not for egress. She leans back, looking further down the corridor, spotting the egress door. It too is intact. There was no escape from the cleanroom. The contamination they’ve seen is from the space probe itself, of that Kath is sure.
“It’s locked,” Kath says, seeing a distinct black keycard reader on the wall.
Nolan pulls a jack out of his bag.
“What are you going to do? Change a tire?”
From behind his full-face mask, Nolan glares at her. He holds the jack sideways and wedges the blades into the gap between the doors, pushing the rubberized seals apart. A few cranks of the handle and the door starts to open.
“Nice,” Kath says as a gap widens. He keeps going until it’s wide enough for them to slip through wearing their scuba gear. As it is, Kath still catches her air tank on the edge of the door.
Once they’re inside the anteroom, Nolan says, “Look for something we can use to wedge this door open and I’ll shift the jack to the far door.”
Kath says, “We could just knock.”
“What?” Nolan says, looking at her as though she’s mad.
“Aliens wouldn’t knock, right? If we knock, they might let us in.”
“There’s someone in there?” Nolan asks, joining her by the window in the far door.
“I think so.”
Kath raps her knuckles on the glass. It takes a few seconds, but a bleary-eyed scientist in a pressure suit comes up to the window. He speaks through an intercom on the wall. His voice is raspy and broken.
“You made it.”
“Yes. Can you let us in?” Kath asks.
“No,” he says, shaking his head at her misunderstanding. “Who made it?”
“Who?” Nolan asks, surprised by the notion, but Kath intuitively grasps what must have happened. After they lost communication with the outside world, the team must have drawn straws to see who would stay and who would go and seek help. They probably loaded up all the relevant information they had on a bunch of hard drives, wanting to get their data out.
“No one,” she says from behind her mask.
The man in the inflated suit on the other side of the glass hangs his head. Tears land on the inside of his clear plastic visor. He straightens.
“Why are you here?” he asks. “You’re not here for me, are you?”
“No,” Kath says, being brutally honest. “We need your data.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get you out of there,” Nolan says, being more aware than her of the need for empathy.
“Oh, yeah,” Kath says, feeling bad at her sterile approach.
“You need to suit up,” he says. “Close the outer door, get into a suit, and I’ll flush the lock.”
Kath already has her face mask off. The prospect of shedding the heavy steel air tank on her back was enough motivation for her. Nolan gets one of the SEALs in the hallway to remove the jack and the outer door shuts. Peeling off Neoprene scuba suits with barely any fingers is arduous. Kath sits on one bench. Nolan sits opposite her on another.
“Just like old times, huh?” he says with red marks running across his face, highlighting where the scuba mask seals sat moments ago. His hair is sweaty and matted.
“At least we’re not going to freeze to death in there,” Kath says, referring to their time on the Orion spacecraft.
“Well, this is another first. I’ve never gone into a cleanroom before.”
“You’re already in one,” Kath says.
“What do you mean?”
“This is a cleanroom,” she says, pointing at the floor. “It’s just not as clean as the next room.”
“Ah.”
The positive-pressure suits are lightweight. A zip extends from the upper left leg to the top of the right shoulder, allowing them to climb in and enclose themselves within the blue plastic suits.
“I’m not sure how this is supposed to work,” Nolan says as the hood and visor built into the suit flop around on his head, leaving him looking at his feet.
“You need to hook up to an air line on the roof,” Kath says, handing one to him. She shows him how to plug it into the valve on his waistband. Immediately, his suit inflates. The hood rises above his head, being held aloft by the pressure inside.
The scientist within the cleanroom watches them through the glass in the door. He activates a control panel and a bright UV light washes over them.
“Just waiting on the PPM to equalize.”
“PPM?” Nolan asks.
“Parts per million,” Kath says.
“This is an ISO class 1 room,” the scientist says, pointing at the floor of his room. “We filter the air to ensure nothing over a micron makes it inside.”
Nolan says, “So that’s a very clean cleanroom, huh?”
“Cleaner than anywhere else on the planet,” Kath says.
“If you need to bring anything in here, you’ll need to flush it or bag it,” the scientist says, pointing at a workstation on the wall.
“Of course,” Kath says. Nolan hands her the laptop. She sits at the workstation and begins cleaning it. A brilliant blue/ultraviolet light shines on the table, sterilizing any equipment placed there. Kath runs a vacuum hose with a bristled end over the laptop, working it around the screen, over each row of keys on the keyboard, over the mousepad and across the various ports. She repeats the process with the satellite dish.
Nolan has his back to the door so the scientist inside the lab can’t see his face. He mouths the word, “Really?” It seems he’s questioning the need for cleaning their equipment in the middle of an alien invasion. It’s a fair point. Given they’re one claymore explosion away from being overrun, it does seem tedious, but Kath understands. Science is about eliminating noise. It’s about getting clean, clear data and there’s nowhere that’s more apparent than in a cleanroom. Cross-contamination could lead to confusion and incorrect conclusions.
She nods, bagging the samples she’s collected on the way to the lab. It’s now a bunch of sample containers inside a plastic bag that is inside yet another, more sturdy plastic bag.
“Okay, we’re good to go.”
“Flushing the lock and opening the door,” the scientist says.
The door opens and they step through an air curtain. An invisible wall of air hits their suits. It comes from the floor, the ceiling and the walls around the inner door, but it’s no more than half an inch in width, pushing back toward the anteroom, away from the lab.
Nolan looks up, unsure if he should proceed.
“It’s an air shower,” Kath says. “One last process to protect the cleanroom.”
“Okay.”
“And now we switch air lines,” she says, releasing her line and watching as it retracts into the anteroom. The scientist hands her a new line coming down from the ceiling. The tube is shaped like a slinky, giving them the flexibility to move around the room. There are several other air line stations, allowing scientists to switch as needed.
“Dr. MacKenzie,” the scientist says, offering to shake her hand even though her hands are full. Fame has at least some benefits. She smiles warmly, putting the laptop, satellite dish and sample bags on a nearby table.
“And you’re?”
“Dr. James Mahoney—lead investigator on the astrobiology research team here at JSC.”
They shake rubbery gloves, only Kath doesn’t have fingers extending to the end of her tips so the soft, squishy ends are easily compressed.
“And this is Brigadier General Nolan Landis,” she says.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Please, call me Nolan.”
“And Kath.”
“And James.”
“What have you learned?” Kath asks, setting up her laptop and powering it on. Nolan unfolds the satellite dish and positions it on the desk.
“Will that even work?” James asks, pointing at the dish. “Down here?”
“Military-grade,” Nolan says. “This will work under a hundred feet of water.”
“What have you discovered?” Kath asks, repeating her question. “What data do you have from the original sample?”
“Oh, lots,” he says, bringing over a portable hard drive. “It’s fascinating. Revolutionary. It’s a bioarete—a perfect biological specimen. It uses polychromatic groups that overlap with terrestrial DNA.”
“You’re going to have to explain that,” Kath says, plugging in his portable hard drive.
“There are over five hundred amino acids. Life on Earth uses only twenty-two, while DNA has just four bases.”
“Right,” Kath says. “So different combinations of the four bases form the instructions to make proteins out of these twenty-two acids.”
“Yes. And we call that grouping monochromatic. It’s life in black and white. The organic material from An̆duru has multiple groupings. Some are similar to ours. Most aren’t, but they’re all consistent with each other.”
“Polychromatic,” Kath says. “Lots of colors.”
“Yes. It’s an analogy. The groups are like complementary shades on a color wheel.”
“Ah,” she says. “I get it. Not every color goes together, but those that do need to be in harmony with each other.”
“Exactly,” he points at a series of folders on the portable hard drive. “This is all the raw data. There are also a bunch of subfolders with my work in them. You can have it all.”
“Thank you,” Kath says, connecting to a remote file server on the internet and starting the upload. “How many color groups did you detect?”
“Seventeen,” James says. “No group has more than thirty acids. There’s some overlap, with bases like adenine and guanine being shared by ten of the groups—including ours. The phosphate and sugar groups used to form nucleotides differ slightly, but not by much.”
“What do you make of these colored groups?” Kath asks, barely understanding the concept but curious about the implications.
“Johan thought they reflected different lifeforms on different planets. Several of them are close to ours.”
“Huh?” Kath says, stunned by the realization they’re indirectly gaining insights into life on multiple planets throughout the galaxy.
Nolan says, “What does all this mean in plain English?”
Kath says, “These things have infected at least seventeen other planets—probably far more. They carry with them the blueprints from these different worlds.”
“Seventeen different types of life!” James says, throwing his arms wide. “And across all of them, there are the same basic patterns. They may differ in chemistry, but there’s the same basic scaffolding. Genetic information is stored in either pairs or triplicates. Oh, and the start/stop codons are remarkably similar.”
“You can distinguish individual genes?” Kath asks, surprised by the notion. “I didn’t think that would be possible.”
“Oh, yes,” James says. His eyes light up. “It’s a case of pattern matching. My work has identified over five hundred thousand genes. We have no idea what they do, but their length and placement is duplicated across the various color groups.”
“That’s astonishing,” Kath says. “So this stuff is like a Swiss Army Knife.”
“Yes.”
“And half a million genes? That’s a lot?” Nolan asks.
“Humans have twenty-five thousand,” Kath says.
“Genes are deceptive,” James says. “Tomatoes have almost thirty-two thousand. Crazy, huh? No heart. No brain. No nervous system. And yet they have more genes than us—seven thousand more!”
“Life as we know it is an illusion,” Kath says, watching as the upload progress passes 10%. “Here on Earth, there is only one type of life—DNA. Oh, we see lions and crocodiles, peacocks and cockroaches, but all that’s a mirage. We’re judging a book by its cover. Zoom in and all life has roughly the same cells, the same DNA structures and often the same genes. Pick a gene at random from an elephant and there’s a 99% chance you’ll find the same gene in a mouse! On the surface, it seems preposterous, but the diversity we see between animals is smoke and mirrors. At a cellular level, they’re often indistinguishable.”
“But here,” James says. “Here we get to see seventeen ecosystems all at once.”
“Wait a minute,” Nolan says. “What about those things out there? Are they multi-colored or whatever? I mean, how are they? None of this should be possible.”
Kath hands James her sample bag, saying, “Can you sequence these while we’re uploading your data?”
“Sure,” he says. “The data gathering process is quite quick. It’s the analysis that takes time.”
He leads them over to an isolation chamber on the side of the lab. It’s a cleanroom within a cleanroom. Three pairs of gloves reach into a transparent box the size of a chest freezer. Beyond the Perspex screen, there are a bunch of pipettes, an autoclave, a gene sequencer and several devices Kath doesn’t recognize. James opens the side panel and inserts the sample bag into a mini-airlock. He has to slip his already gloved hands into the gloves on the box to retrieve the bag from the other side.
“Would you like to assist?” he asks.
“I’d love to,” Kath says, sitting next to him and slipping her hands into another pair of gloves protruding from the Perspex front panel. She can feel air circulating inside, being drawn down into the sterilizing unit beneath the chamber.
James extracts each of the samples with the care of someone disabling a bomb. He labels each pipette sample, handing them off to Kath who puts them into one of the sequencers.
“Your talents are wasted in astronomy,” he says, joking with her.
“Give me a supernova over aliens any day,” she says. “Less mess.”
“Okay, I’ve heard from Jackson,” Nolan says, pressing his hand to his earpiece and scrunching his suit up against the side of his head for a moment. “That fire door leads to an external stairwell that emerges behind the main building. The Apache attack helicopters are watching those stairs. We should be good to exit that way.”
Kath says, “Sure beats tangling with those creatures again.”
“I—I don’t understand. There was no breach,” James says. He sounds nervous. “I don’t know how they got out. We heard screams—explosions.”
“It was the Aquarius probe,” Kath says. “Some of the viable material from the artifact hitched a ride on it.”
“Fertile eggs?”
“I guess so,” Kath says, hating her use of the word guess. Guesses are for sports commentators, not scientists.
“And they grew from there?”
“Heat. Atmosphere. Moisture in the air,” Kath says. “I don’t know what the catalyst was, but all they needed was exposure to the conditions on Earth.”
James is quiet, nodding within the confines of his positive-pressure suit. He fiddles with the samples in the isolation chamber, making sure everything is tidy and ordered. He’s distracting himself. Kath can spot OCD a light-year away.
“Has there been much damage?” he asks as the first results come back from the gene sequencers. Several screens mounted on the bank of computer servers are suddenly flooded with information. Text scrolls faster than anyone could ever read, but Kath pauses. This is the first time James has asked about the outside world.
“They’ve run riot,” Nolan says, which is an understatement.
“They,” James says, lingering on that one word. He stops himself from going further. It seems he’s trapped by a question he can’t or won’t articulate. Kath can’t imagine the doubts running through his head. If she’d been down here for days, the isolation would have driven her mad. She doubts she would have had his staying power. It’s the uncertainty that would have got to her. Waiting for two days is easy. Waiting with no end in sight is torture. Kath would have buckled. Curiosity would have driven her mad. She would have gone up for a look and been killed along with the others. It took courage for James to keep going with his research while waiting for a rescue that might have never come. Now, everything has changed. A rescue party has arrived. Thousands of questions must be flooding his mind and yet he halts on that one word they.
They personifies the aliens. They aren’t microbes. He must sense the enormity of the situation above, but he remains professional. “And our data. You think it will help?”
