Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (29 page)

“Still nothing from Gregg?” he
asked.

“Nothing,” she said, clearly
worried. She had sent an emergency alert to a smart phone that
Gregg carried specifically for secure communications with the base.
“He’s never taken longer than ten minutes to answer, for real
emergencies or the weekly tests we do.”

“What’s that?” Jack pointed to a
timer in the window showing Gregg’s contact information on her
screen. It read 00:02:13 and was counting down toward zero with
every passing second.

“It’s his dead man switch limit,”
she said. “Everyone who goes topside has to make contact with the
base once every twenty-four hours using preset codes. One code is
an all-clear, the other is a duress code, used when they’re in
trouble and being forced to use normal communications
procedures.”

“And if they don’t call in before
the twenty-four hours is up?”

“We assume the worst.” She looked up
at him. “Gregg’s never been this far into the twenty-four hours
before. My God, if something’s happened to him...”

Jack was worried, too, but not just
about Gregg. “Naomi,” he said, “you’ve got to start thinking about
evacuating the base.”

She turned from the workstation and
stared up at him. “Why?”

“Because Ellen probably compromised
us,” he told her bluntly. “She’s been a willing accomplice of the
harvesters for months, at least since she let the last one out of
its cage. I find it hard to believe that she never revealed
anything that might lead them to us.”

“Ellen would have told us if she’d
said anything,” Naomi said. “She had no reason to conceal anything
from us...at the end.”

Jack shook his head. “Naomi, even if
that’s true, don’t you think the harvesters might have been able to
learn enough from her over the last several months to figure out
where this operation is? I know it’s not an easy thing to consider
with everything that’s been invested here, but it’s a damn big
assumption that she never even slipped up and dropped a
clue.”

“If they’d known before, they would
have come already,” Naomi countered. “And if they had found out
after what happened in Nebraska, they would have come right away,
even before she got here.”

“Besides,” Renee said into the
sudden silence that had fallen over the command center as everyone
picked up on their conversation, “it’s not a simple matter for us
to evacuate from here, Jack.”

“Listen, I know you don’t just pick
up an operation like this and all the research you’re doing and
move it at the drop of a hat,” he replied. “I get that. But if the
harvesters have the sort of influence in the government that you
seem to think they do, once they find out what’s going on here,
they’ll come. And even this fortress won’t hold them off forever.
You’ve got to have a plan B for when that happens.”

“You don’t understand, Jack,” Naomi
told him. “If it were only a question of saving ourselves or the
research here, the equipment, it wouldn’t be a problem. If it was
just that, Gregg would probably have set up shop in a warehouse or
office complex somewhere. And we do have backup locations for the
research aspect of what we do here.”

“But the reason we can’t just pick
up and leave is because of what’s in the missile silos,” Renee told
him.

“The freezers,” Naomi clarified. “We
have the world’s largest collection of genetically pure seed here,
especially varieties of the primary agricultural food
crops.”

“And don’t forget the bees,” said a
middle-aged man with a dark complexion and jet black hair. “Even
worms.”

Naomi smiled. “And bees and worms,”
she said with a respectful nod. “This is Dr. Vijay Chidambaram. He
pioneered a method of sustaining honeybee and other critical insect
larvae and certain types of earthworms in cold storage for what we
hope will be a long, long time.”

Jack stared at her, uncomprehending.
“Seeds, honeybees, and worms,” he muttered. “Oh, my.” Looking
between her and the smiling Chidambaram, he said, “I’m missing
something. I thought the main thing you were doing here is research
to figure out what this retrovirus that Kempf engineered into the
crops will do.”

“We are, Jack,” Naomi explained.
“And if we’re successful, hopefully we’ll be able to halt or even
reverse the effects of the retrovirus on the human and animal
populations.

“But even if we can defeat the
retrovirus in humans and animals, if the New Horizons seed is
released, we’ll still have to deal with infected crops in the
biosphere,” she went on. “Every successive generation of infected
strain and anything it cross-pollinates with will still have the
retrovirus. The only way we can defeat the harvesters’ plan in the
long term is to destroy the strains they’re putting into our food
supply, and any wild cross-strains, and replace them with
genetically pure species.”

“And to do that,” Chidambaram told
him quietly, “we have to have large quantities of pure seed stocks
to work from, and the critical facilitators from the plant and
animal kingdoms to enable pollination and breeding. There are over
fourteen hundred germplasm genebanks in the world. Seed
repositories,” he went on. “But most of them are small, and even
the large ones do not have nearly enough seed stock to quickly
regenerate the major food crops. And we must assume that whatever
effect the retrovirus has on the biosphere will adversely affect
the insects critical to pollination, thus our focus on preserving
them, as well.”

“But if there are already a bunch of
these genebanks out there, why make another one?”

“Because they’re vulnerable, Jack,”
Naomi said. “Remember: they don’t know about the threat we face.
Most of them have little or no real physical security, and some are
victims to lack of funding or subversion, which we know the
harvesters have capitalized on. That’s basically what happened to
Bari, the largest genebank in Italy,” she explained. “Back in 2002
the Italian government decided to merge it with research centers
that were focused on genetically engineered plants, and created the
Plant Genetic Institute. The new management, which was run mainly
by the GMO researchers, largely ignored the genebank’s original
mission of germplasm conservation – the preservation of native
seeds – and focused the institute’s resources on genetic
research.”

“They even let the cooling systems
for the seeds in the cold storage vaults fail and didn’t repair
them for months,” Chidambaram added. “It’s difficult to estimate
what damage may have been done.”

Naomi nodded. “The harvesters and
their human collaborators took Bari out of the game through
political maneuvering and calculated neglect. The same has happened
to many of the other smaller genebanks.”

“Most of the genebanks contain a
wide range of species,” Chidambaram said, getting back on the
subject of Jack’s question. “Ours focuses on core food crops for
humans and livestock, plus supporting species that help protect
against pests and weeds. This makes our job somewhat easier, as
fewer than one-hundred and fifty species, albeit of many varieties,
are used these days in modern agriculture. Those and some plants
critical for livestock make up most of what is preserved in the
silo vaults.”

“So this place is the secret backup
for the backups,” Jack said, and Chidambaram nodded. “But how long
would that take? I mean, if the harvesters got their mutated
strains out there and everything went to hell in the food chain,
how fast could you sort things out again?”

“Even with the combined resources of
all the genebanks, it would take years, possibly decades,
especially if the crops of commercial seed producers were
contaminated.” At Jack’s puzzled look, Chidambaram explained, “Most
farmers don’t plant from their own seed, but buy it from commercial
seed producers. If their seed is contaminated, many farmers will
have nothing to plant.” He looked at Jack with dark, sad eyes.
“Beyond whatever the retrovirus itself may do, it is nearly certain
that millions, many millions, would die of starvation before the
balance could be restored.”

“And it might take centuries to root
out and destroy any remaining vestiges of the retrovirus in the
biosphere,” Naomi added bleakly, “especially if those strains
cross-pollinate with any plants outside of the agricultural
chain.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack murmured. Now
he had a grasp of the magnitude of what was happening, but suddenly
wished he had remained blissfully ignorant. “Okay, so I guess we
just hunker down here and hope for the best.”

Naomi stood up, stretched, and
hooked her arm in his. “Come on,” she told him. “I need to go check
on some things in the lab, and you can check on
Alexander.”

As they made their way across the
junction linking the two subterranean domes, he asked, “Would it
really be that bad? If something happens to the…native
seeds?”

She nodded. “Yes. The harvesters
have a good strategy for whittling us down, and it’s going to be
hard to beat. And if something’s happened to Gregg...” She shook
her head. “I can’t fill his shoes, Jack. I’m not going to say we
can’t go on without him, because we will, but if he’s...gone, it
will be a catastrophic loss to our cause.”

That made Jack feel guilty about the
less-than-kind thoughts he’d had about Gregg Thornton during their
brief acquaintance, and he had to admit to himself that he’d never
in a million years have been able to conjure up all the things
Gregg had. The front companies, this huge facility, and whatever
else was out there that was part of the Earth Defense Society that
Jack didn’t even know about yet.

“I’ve got faith in you, Naomi,” he
told her, and she slipped her hand into his and squeezed
it.

After they passed through the blast
door into the lab dome, Naomi guided him toward the back where
there was what looked like a small operating theater with movable
panels forming temporary walls around it. Theresa, the vet, was
there with another woman, talking quietly. Both wore surgical
scrubs, but had their masks pulled down around their necks. Jack
tensed up at the sight of Alexander, stretched out on the table,
until Theresa turned toward them and smiled.

Jack blew his breath out, unaware
that he’d been holding it.

“He’s going to be okay,” Theresa
told him. “It looked worse than it was. He had a bad cut along his
chest and probably a concussion. He lost a fair bit of blood, but
he’ll be okay. His scars won’t be quite as impressive as Koshka’s,
except for the ear, I suppose.”

“Hey, you big dummy,” Jack
whispered, leaning down to gently stroke the fur on Alexander’s
forehead.

The big cat’s eyes were still
unfocused from the waning effects of the anesthesia, but he slowly
reached out with his tongue to touch Jack’s hand.

“No more heroics, okay?”

Alexander answered by closing his
eyes.

“He’s going to need some rest for a
while,” Theresa told him. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when he’s
up and around.”

“Okay,” Jack said uncertainly. He
had always hated leaving Alexander at the vet’s office. The big cat
always cried in the crate when Jack took him, and then cried all
the way home, making Jack feel like he was guilty of animal
abuse.

With a final look, Jack turned away
and followed Naomi upstairs to the mezzanine level. Taking a few
turns around stacks of crates and boxes, they came to a small
walled-in section that wasn’t easily seen from below.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s our biohazard room,” she told
him. “It’s not anything at all like what Fort Dietrich has in its
labs for biological warfare research. Instead of trying to seal off
the room completely, we use small self-contained biosafety
containment chambers where we keep our specimens.”

“And what sort of ‘specimens’ do you
have in here?” Jack asked, hesitating as Naomi keyed open the door
and stepped inside. He noticed that the door was hermetically
sealed, but there were no biohazard suits in evidence. The only
thing that struck him as odd about the room were the closely spaced
sprinkler units on the ceiling.

“Anti-viral dispensers,” she told
him. “If there’s any sign of a breach, everything in here will be
flooded with a wash of a chlorine-based compound that will kill any
viruses or bacteria if they’re exposed to it long
enough.”

“Then what?” Jack asked. “What about
anybody who’s in here if that happens?”

“They stay in here, Jack,” she told
him grimly. “At least until we’re certain there’s no sign of
infection. There’s an airlock system to pass food in, and there’s
an independent water and waste system in here. Assuming you make it
through the anti-viral wash and have a chance to worry about such
things. Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen, okay? I don’t really
fancy having my skin blistered, or worse. That stuff isn’t anything
you want to mess around with.”

Leading him up to one of four large
cylinders lying on their sides, with integrated rectangular
cabinets supporting them, she explained, “These are the biosafety
containment chambers. They have externally controlled waldos and
instruments that we can use to take many types of samples, and we
can anesthetize the specimens, as well. And of course we can feed,
water, and clean up after them, with the waste being collected in
the unit’s support cabinet where it’s taken care of with a small
incinerator.”