Vik boxed it, clicked, and the image expanded to fill the screen. “I’ll be damned. But wait. Let me get a three-dimensional look with X-ray and resonance.” The woman’s competent fingers clicked several of the keys, and the image seemed to pop from the screen, to fix on one of the hexagonally shaped cells, its internal structure in eerie relief.

“So, it has a different morphology from that first reference prokaryote we recovered from seawater.” Michaela pointed. “What are these structures?”

Vik again boxed and clicked, looked at the internally folded organelles, and clicked on the FTIR function. “I’d call them the Donovanian equivalent of a terrestrial chloroplast. Whatever this is, it’s capable of photosynthesis.”

“Some sort of plant cells? In the kid’s blood?”

Vik’s jaw had tensed. “Not a plant, Michaela. I’m not reading cellulose. The structural support is some kind of polymer. This is nothing from Earth. Besides, terrestrial plant cells have a nucleus. This thing is a combination of weird organelles the likes of which I’ve never seen.”

Vik boxed a section of cytoplasm, clicked, and enlarged. “Got you, you toilet-sucker.” She glanced sidelong at Michaela. “Recognize that?”

“Yep. TriNA.” A cold shiver ran through her. “Toni’s got some kind of colony living inside of him that’s made up of photosynthesizing cells. And his blood is full of cell-free TriNA.”

“So, what do we do now, Director?”

“Vik, I don’t have a fricking clue. I can’t even imagine what kind of etiology we’re talking about. But however Toni was exposed, it’s all through the kid’s body.”

“Doesn’t make sense!” Vik cried. “That little boy has never been outside the Pod. This is a photosynthesizing cellular organism. How is it living inside the child’s body? There is no way it could have infected him. The kid’s three!”

“No clue,” Michaela told her. “But one thing we’d better figure out bottom-line up-front: Is this stuff contagious?”

Vik didn’t answer; she just stared at the screen.

Thinking of her daughter, Sheena, no doubt.

42

Felix hated being scared. And now he was really, really scared. One by one he and the rest of the children had been marched up the now-threatening stairs to the second level. A forbidden place of mystery and wonder with its labs and specimen rooms, everything up there reeked of danger and threat. Like it had been back on Ashanti where cannibals were down on Deck Three. Living there. Just under that thin layer of sialon beneath his feet. Everyone was afraid that they might get past the sealed hatch, creep up the stairs at night, and kidnap people to be hauled back down into that dark and terrible place to be horribly killed, cut up into bloody pieces, and eaten.