Page 17 of Stellar Drift (Central Galactic Concordance)
Houyen’s first reaction when he saw the door to an actual cryogenex vivo-vault was wonder. Their locations were kept secret because the priceless contents were vulnerable to thieves, and more critically, to contamination.
His next thought was to wonder what bonehead thought it was a good idea to install a critical deep-freeze unit at the top of a frickin’ volcano in a terrain full of them.
In the middle of a frickin’ tropical rainforest that had more insidiously invasive plants and insects per square kilometer than any other known habitat.
In a region with a recent geological history of frickin’ earthquakes that might have cracked open an incalloy box like an adult wuzzy bug cracked open its silvery nymph carapace before flying away.
Oh, and in a mountainous area known for stalled storms that produced days of torrential rains.
Enough to fill a cracked vault with so much water that the lock of the two-meter-thick door failed under the pressure, forcing the door open just enough to allow a steady flood to escape and take the contaminated vault contents — and thousands of drowned wuzzy-bug nymphs — with it.
The three-tone beeping that Kyala had heard came from the glowing access panel to the right of the door.
It reminded him of the alarm in the base’s kitchen cold box when someone left the door open.
The access panel and the smooth rock wall it was embedded in were the only things in the vault not ruined.
“You recognize this,” Sairy said. It wasn’t a question.
“I do. It’s a seed vault.” He gave her the colloquial name for it.
“After the defeated Central League tried to poison hundreds of rebel planets as a final fuck-you, the brand new Central Galactic Concordance government established the banks on random member planets throughout the galaxy. They have DNA and actual samples of every keystone plant and animal species we need to make a viable terraform. Or recover a colonized planet that’s been poisoned. ”
“Oh.”
Something in her tone made her turn and look at her. It was hard to see with only the light from his gauntlet and the blinking door frame, but she looked troubled. Maybe even afraid.
He continued. “Their existence wasn’t secret, exactly, but I only learned about them while studying for my D-level botany degree. Before this, I’ve only seen pictures of them.”
She raised her left arm to expose the percomp on her wrist. “Like this?”
A hologram image appeared of a pristine and intact seed-vault door.
He studied it, then glanced back to the vault entrance. “Yeah. But now that I look at this one and your image, I don’t recognize that big, red-and-black serpentine symbol above the seed vault logo. Maybe it came later?”
Wordlessly, she pushed back up right sleeve. Tattooed on the inside swell of her forearm was that same symbol.
He peered at the abstract symbol. “What is it?”
She pulled her sleeve back down. “It’s the logo of the last secret CPS black-box project I was on before I came here. All the pilots were given one.” She sneered. “Cameraderie, they said.”
He blinked in surprise at her revelation. Maybe he was in fever dream again.
She tilted her head toward the entrance. “Can you see the text above the biometric reader on that access panel?”
Perplexed, he took a couple of steps closer, trying not to step on more wuzzy-bug shells than he had to because the horrible smell in the cave got worse when he did.
“Looks like a serial number or something.” When he brushed off accumulated dust, he accidentally awakened the biometric reader, but its light made the text easier to see. “Starts with—”
She interrupted to recite the long string of characters perfectly, as if reading from something only she could see.
“That’s…” He stopped himself and shook his head. “Yeah. Okay, I’m lost.”
Whatever she was going to say was drowned out by the piercing shriek of metal-on-metal as the vault door slowly creaked open.
He crossed back to stand beside her as the massive door continued its tortured journey.
At the halfway point, lights flickered on sporadically in the vault interior.
The smell wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but the condition inside was worse than he’d imagined.
Thick, rope-like roots hung down from multiple cracks in the incalloy ceiling and clogged the room in a dense tangle.
Smaller roots of all sizes intertwined them as if they’d been woven by demented spiders.
He couldn’t tell where the very healthy roots were getting their nutrients, but it had to be from the vault.
Now he wished he’d paid more attention in school about how the vaults maintained their contents.
Maybe even samples kept well below sub-zero temperatures needed a viable environment?
Or maybe the nutrients were being preserved as well? No matter. They were all thawed now.
“Do vaults store the seeds in incalloy spheres?”
He looked down to where Sairy pointed. Amongst the roots and the dead insects were thousands of spheres of varying sizes. Several had spilled out when the vault door opened. Crouching, he looked more closely.
Sairy did the same and gently rolled a larger one with the tip of her field knife. “I think that etching was once a circuit.” From her vest pocket, she produced an empty water pouch and used it to scoop up that sphere and several others. She sealed the pouch and put it back in her pocket.
He pointed his chin toward a larger jumble of them in the room. “Some of the spheres look corroded and cracked. I guess even incalloy can be compromised by acids from volcanic soils if you soak them long enough.”
“So, the question of the century is, could this vault be the source of the infinity fever?”
He considered what he knew. “I’d bet high that it’s the breeding ground.
As to the source of the fever? With all this chaotic mess, it wouldn’t surprise me.
We probably shouldn’t even be here without self-contained exosuits, even though it’s been washed out by one or more floods.
I’ll take as many nymph samples as I can, but we don’t have a way to prove they’re the carriers. ”
She cleared her throat. “I can test for the presence of infinity fever right now if it’s infected a living animal. Maybe even dead wuzzy bug nymphs.”
He blinked in surprise. She really was a marvel. He stood and stepped back so he could see her better. “Do it.”
He watched as she opened her bag and pulled out a black injet. She isolated a large, still-damp wuzzy bug corpse and let the microneedles plunge into it. After a moment, the readout blinked yellow, then turned a steady red.
From the look on her face, the wuzzy bug had whatever caused the fever.
Wariness battled with curiosity in him. “Is that how you knew I had it when you found me in my flitter?” Would uncovering her secrets drag him into the dangerous world of black-box projects? He wished he had time to think about all this.
She stood and stowed the injet, but stayed where she was, close to the threshold, her eyes evading his. “You already had the symptoms — the rash, the fever, the wheezing. The test just confirmed it.”
“If I’ve pieced together enough accurate memories, you took me somewhere and gave me the drug to treat the fever, let me sleep it off for three days, then left me in my flitter to wake up afterward.”
“Close enough. You were so very sick. I panicked.” She sighed, then turned to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Your treatment saved my life. Why are you sorry?”
“Because you couldn’t consent.” Blowing out a noisy breath, she added, “Any more than that dying boy or his family, or those three other people in Axolotl Bend could.”
“Based on my research, the fever very likely could have killed me.” Intuition struck him. “And it’s not exactly untested, is it? You’ve used it in Irakat and the other river towns for the past three years. They went from dozens of deaths a year to none. How did you do it?”
“Every time they had an outbreak, I volunteered to help care for the sick. If they noticed an extra slap patch, no one said anything.” She shoved her hands under her armpits and dropped her head. “Like you, I couldn’t let kids just die.”
Another intuition spark flared. “You caught the fever and developed the treatment for yourself.” He knew she had an eclectic background, including medic experience.
She looked up at him in surprise, then nodded.
“Elkano insisted. I think he was terrified I was going to die. I was never as sick as you were. I just felt like crap for weeks. We had the right equipment and training. And incredible luck. That would have been the end of it, but then we realized the ship’s lab had leaked during our atmosphere entry.
We left pieces of ablated incalloy shielding scattered across the rainforest during our landing.
” A bleak look crossed her face. “I thought we were the source of the infinity fever, so I’ve been collecting them. ”
“And now you know you weren’t.”
“That’s why I agreed to come on this expedition.
I wanted you to have the proof you’ve worked so hard to find.
I was hoping the CPS would bring in their pharma partners to fully test my treatment and distribute it.
” She glanced toward the red-and-black logo on the wall.
“But considering your boss…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “I’ve always been na?ve like that.”
While she was in a revelatory mood, he asked another question. “Why does your military ship have a research lab?”
“It’s not a warship, it’s an experimental exploration starship. It has everything the CPS designers could think of to make it self-reliant for at least a decade.”
“It’s still intact?” Everything he learned about her kept surprising him. “I thought you crashed.”