Outward Borne (32 page)

YuLon called an early morning
conference in the Farside module so that CamBi could present her
findings on the Kalekto disease. Even as she began, the security
alarm in the Huc habitat sounded. YuLon held up her hand to stop
the meeting and ran quickly down the hallway to determine its
cause. ObLaDas rarely ran, so it was something to see. She returned
in less than a minute, flushed with concern. Two Huc corpses,
wasted and partially decomposed, had been found in the refuse area
of their habitat. She told CamBi to come with her. CamBi felt
frustrated and puzzled as they walked to the security monitors to
see the bodies. She did not need another distraction. The
appearance of the bodies shocked her into an even less pleasant
reality. The Huc corpses were very similar to that of twenty-six,
she had to believe that they been killed by the same disease,
Replicide. CamBi left immediately and rushed back through the hall.
She grabbed Di DonSi, and together they entered the transit
shuttle. She shut the doors, not waiting to see if anyone else was
coming.

“
So,” she asked Di DonSi, “how
many connections are there between the habitats?”

“
None,” he answered, “They are
completely sealed off. Not even light gets out of a habitat. You
know that.”

“
I know they are sealed.” She
answered more sharply than she intended, “but there are pipes. Food
and water go in, crap and junk come out. What about those? We have
got to think. How were the Hucs infected?”

“
How do you know it is the same
disease, how can you be sure? We need to run some tests, don’t we?”
Di DonSi answered, angrily, as the shuttle wavered along its
cables.

CamBi waved her hands quickly,
dismissing this line of discussion. “There is no doubt, Dio. The
Hucs are one of the oldest species on board. They have been here
for three thousand years. Twenty-five days after the Kalektos
arrive, they start to melt. What else can it be? What about waste
products? They would be contaminated. Could it have gotten out that
way?”

Di DonSi slumped into a corner to
hold on as the shuttle became less and less weighted. “Well, it
could get out that way, of course, but that would be the end of it.
All organic waste is broken down to the unit molecular level before
it is passed on for recycling, but not even that is happening. The
two little habitats that are operating in the Farside are so small
that we have been stocking up their waste material. Recycling will
not begin until we get enough to work on. Only metals are being
recovered at this point, and that is mostly from scrap construction
material,” he said as he looked closely at CamBi. She was holding
onto the retaining rail with both mits firmly clenched. He was
hardly being helpful, as the car ran weightless past the
hub.

“
Air, water, food, meds, what else
got in there? How could that be the cause?” CamBi asked, she was
talking to herself now, but not answering that it would be all her
fault if it had. “Dio, we need to check everything. You can see
that can’t you.”

Of course he could. Diseases
rarely crossed from one species to another, even on the same
planet. Crossing to an alien species was incomprehensible and
ominous. If it could kill the Hucs, no one was safe? Di DonSi began
to feel uncomfortably confined within the suddenly small Outward
Voyager. He turned inward to think through the tests he would start
and what else might be done. The humans could help, he decided.
There were three in his work party. They would be perfect for this
type of thing. They need not be told that they were in
danger.

CamBi was making her own plans.
She would get YuLon to send in more medical units, new ones, to get
samples from the Huc corpses, and another one to sample the air,
food, water, whatever the Hucs might have consumed. She would look
into her own stores for any trace of Replicide. The shuttle eased
to a stop, the doors finally opened, she walked into her anti-mod
laboratory without another word. Di DonSi was away to get on with
his grim and urgent duty.

CamBi worked through the day and
well into the night. Exhausted from tension as much as the long
hours, she finished loading the last of the tissue samples from the
Huc habitat. The dead, the living, and everything else she could
think of, were all set running in the auto analyzers. Finished at
last, she fell asleep in the corner of the lab to the droning hum
of pumps and clicking valves.

It seemed only minutes later that
CamBi was woken by YuLon’s urgent message. Without a greeting,
YuLon began telling her that several LabislassLees were complaining
of feeling pains and cramps. “Could they be infected too?” YuLon
asked, hardly expecting an answer to her own question.

CamBi did not give her one, as she
asked instead to have a full sampling of the LabislassLee habitat.
“And don’t let anyone or anything enter or leave the Farside Arm,”
she added. Even though she had slept for half the night, CamBi felt
as bad as she ever had, but instead of lying back on her pleasantly
warm mat or freshening her slime, she went straight into the dimly
lit lab to look at the early test results. The instrument lights
blinked as they worked away, the samples were not half finished,
but a great deal of information was already available. The first
samples and the fastest test would identify Replicide in the tissue
of the Huc corpses, if it were there. She was surprised. The
initial scans were not positive for Replicide, but gave a weak,
inconclusive signal instead. The more detailed test results that
she needed to learn what that meant would not start coming in for
another hour. She sat down to pick at the leftovers from last
night’s meal, and called YuLon about the LabislassLees.

“
Nothing new,” YuLon answered, “at
least none of them have died yet. We started taking samples of
everything, but it got them in a panic. Those clever little bugs
had tapped into the ship’s communications and had been listening to
the whole story. They are desperate to get out of the Farside arm,
but nothing and no one will be allowed into the rest of the ship.
MaxNi9 has decided to isolate the arm. He will have a horde of
humans cutting all the pipes, ducts, and conduits,
whatever.”

And I will be as trapped as they
are, CamBi said to herself, and I had better figure out what is
going on and be quick about it. She found out soon enough, and was
not happy about what she learned. The Huc tissues were loaded with
a protein, not Replicide, but a close relative. It was a protein,
with some different amino acids, but with almost the same activity.
She walked slowly over to the sample storage vault, not really
believing what she knew to be true. She took out a tissue sample
from one of the Huc corpse, warmed it up to body temperature, and
watched the son-of-Replicide ate away at the tissue, sinking it
into a slimy puddle.

Her mind was a muddle of unanswered questions.
How had Replicide spread? Why was it changed? Could this be my
fault? She called Di DonSi to see if he had found
anything.

“
No, not so far.” He would form a
work crew, humans not bots, to search the exteriors of the Huc and
LabislassLee habitats for leaks and they would work back along the
connecting tubes outside the modules until they found something. He
would let her know.

CamBi picked up her puddle. She
felt somehow connected to this muck. It was real to her now, and
she took some comfort from being able to see it as something real,
however disturbing it may be. The destroyed tissue was filled with
the Replicide lookalike. It was almost the only protein left, which
made isolation and purification easier. Maybe, if she understood
more of this compound, she would be able to understand what was
happening. The size, activity, and function of the protein were all
close to the Kalekto version of Replicide, but a little different.
Her big clue came from the amino acid composition. The new
Replicide was composed entirely of the simplest, most common amino
acids.

Note: Amino Acid
Commonality

The communicated knowledge of the
galaxy had documented life on many different planets. The most
fundamental of these discoveries was that all life forms, no matter
where they existed, had some basic features in common. Every life
form was made up of the same molecular families. All living
organisms required water and were carbon based, this was no
surprise, but it was found that they all were constructed using
self-replicating cell-like structures having common features. Small
units combine to make large, complicated ones, molecules,
biochemicals, cells, and bodies. It was a common theme in all
levels of galactic life. Genetic information is carried by strings
of nucleic acids or something close to it, self-associating lipids
form cell membranes and compartments, sugars or carbohydrates store
energy, while many different proteins facilitate chemical
reactions, form structural units, and perform other duties needed
to sustain life.

The detailed structures of the
molecules within these families vary from planet to planet, but the
same basic molecular types are always present. This was no
coincidence, or so the Primaforms had theorized. They had been the
first to work it out. Apparently, the list of requirements needed
to contribute to a living organism was so lengthily and so
restrictive, that only those few molecular families possessed the
array of properties necessary to meet them. They must be easy to
form under the prevailing environmental conditions in order to be
present in the primordial ooze, stable enough to survive in that
bubbling stew, and most importantly, have the requisite chemical
properties to be able to combine to construct larger entities that
can perform some function useful to a living, self-replicating
organism. It is why a few preferences can narrow your list of a
thousand cars to one or two models.

Enzymes and receptor molecules are
proteins made of alpha amino acid chains. The exact same amino
acids are found in every life form, but there were always a few
that were unique. Proteins are long chains made up of the twenty or
more different amino acids. Each protein has a unique sequence of
amino acids and that sequence causes the protein to fold into a
specific shape. Shape gives these globular molecules their
function, in the same way that a baseball glove can hold a ball
because of its pocket-like shape. The key feature of alpha amino
acids is that they have the same three-atom N-C-CO unit, but may
have different sets of atoms attached to the central carbon. These
groups of atoms appear as a series of side chains set close
together along the length of the peptide and the interactions
between these side chain atoms determine how the protein will fold
and what function it may perform.

|

NH

CH-Side chain

C=O

NH

CH-Side chain

C=O

|

Most of the twenty-five amino
acids in Kalekto proteins were the same those found in other
species. In fact, seventeen occur in the ObLaDas species, but
Kalekto life had eight others that were different.
Alie
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. Why not? The simplest would be the easiest to
form and probably the most abundant, while the more complex could
derive a desirable property from any one of several related but
different structures. The commonality of amino acids is the
practical feature that enabled the ObLaDas to maintain life on the
Outward Voyager. Having a pool of the amino acids common to all
species allowed the ObLaDas to quickly complete the specialized mix
needed to produce foodstuffs required to feed to feed each alien
species. And now it has opened the door to their potential
destruction.

-MDK

CamBi headed the ObLaDas’ facility
that prepared foods for every species on board the Voyager. These
foods were not always a gourmet delight. The Voyager could not
simulate a steak, in spite of having the right proteins and fats,
but it could make a passable paté. The ObLaDas collected a variety
of foods whenever an alien was captured, usually enough to feed
them for about three months, and to identify and copy the molecular
structures that composed their diet. They had those three months to
succeed or the aliens would starve, which is why it was essential
to know that the alien they encountered would be biochemically
similar to the ObLaDas. It would not be possible for the ObLaDas to
invent and implement a completely new suite of technologies within
that fixed time limit.

CamBi knew that all of the Kalekto
foodstuffs had been sterilized and decontaminated before being
brought into her laboratory, but those procedures would not destroy
molecular structures and so they did not destroy Replicide. The
Replicide in the Kalektian foods was treated as just another
nutritious protein.