Chapters (102)
- Cover
- DAW BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF W. MICHAEL GEAR:
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- EPILOGUE
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Hey, wait,” Michaela told them. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We haven’t lost the seatrucks yet. Haven’t even seen anything that threatens them. If we pull the plug on the Pod, we can still evacuate. Even if it means flying to the beach pad, recharging for a day, and then flying on to either PA or Corporate Mine.”
“Don’t be too sure about Port Authority,” Dik announced. “I was on the radio, too. Remember? Dr. Turnienko wasn’t wild about us bringing a bunch of sick kids to PA while they had a communicable disease. Will they even allow any of us to land if we’re infected with whatever’s got the kids sick?”
“I don’t know,” Michaela told them. “And we might get the same answer if we tried for Corporate Mine. Supervisor Aguila might deny us the right to land or insist that we go into quarantine.”
“We don’t know that whatever is wrong with the kids is communicable,” Yosh said. “None of the adults are sick, and we’re sleeping in the same room with the kids, eating with them, touching the same surfaces. If they’re infectious, why haven’t any of us gotten it?”
“I don’t have an answer for that, and neither does Anna.” Michaela turned her attention to Vik Lawrence. “Do you have any idea?”
“No.” Vik ran nervous fingers through her hair. “When this all started to go sideways this afternoon, I got a sample of the organism. If it’s an organism. That’s as good a name as any, I guess. We’ve had it logged in the system for weeks now. It’s the same stuff that Kevina and Felix brought back from that first trip out to place that buoy. At its most basic, we’re dealing with a single prokaryotic and photosynthesizing cell. Now that I have had time to really look at it, it’s the same cell we recovered from all the children’s blood and tissues. I cannot tell you why it’s presenting as a disease in the kids and not the adults. It’s present in the blood and tissues of everyone on this station.”
“All of us?” Yosh demanded as everyone shifted uncomfortably, worried looks shooting back and forth.
“Everyone,” Vik said in a hollow voice. “I don’t know why it is worse in the children. I don’t know why it started to cling to the Pod. I do know that when it starts attaching itself to other cells, it shares information. Slips TriNA back and forth, and maybe transferRNA, microRNAs, and some other molecules as well. Molecular intelligence.”
“What does that mean?” Michaela asked.