Deathlands 119: Polestar Omega by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0373626290
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Dr. Lima scanned the wall-mounted, remote monitor screens from a chair behind a desk in the sound-and germ-proofed autopsy suite. The pint-size, mutie hairballs jumped up and down and jabbered unintelligibly. The huge, quasi-reptilians beat on the bars and wailed to be fed. In contrast, the clutch of tainted Deathlands’ humans stood sullen and silent, staring at each other across the zoo’s aisle.

It was like watching ice melt.

Occasionally Lima tapped the keyboard of the computer in front of him to shift the monitor views or call up fresh sets of vital sign readings. Baseline normal temperatures of the individual Deathlands’ species had already been logged. The cameras’ infrared sensors showed slight fevers among the humans, but there was no measureable increase among the other captives.

Lima and the two enforcers had stripped out of their hot and cumbersome biohazard gear. For the time being, there was no need for it.

Nothing of note had happened, yet.

The black suits didn’t bother to hide their boredom. They both were napping, or pretending to, laid out on autopsy tables—two of the eight spaced around the room, each with its own floor drain. Their heads rested in V-shaped, foam corpse pillows, their arms folded over their chests. The surrounding trolleys and counters were covered with trays of surgical instruments, scales, microscopes, centrifuges and racks of test tubes. One wall was made up of stainless-steel morgue drawers, floor to ceiling; the contents were preserved by the glacier’s natural refrigeration.

The enforcers had every reason to be relaxed. If the viral experiment failed, they would just move on to the next assignment—in South America. Lima was anything but relaxed. Every second that passed without a positive result increased the discomfort building in his bowels.

He zoomed in one of the cameras on the one-eyed Deathlander. Although his head hadn’t moved from the red-haired female’s lap, Lima could see he was still breathing, and his recorded heart signs were disappointingly strong. The female seemed to be speaking to him, but the directional microphone wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up what she was saying over the ambient noise in the room. It was impossible to filter out the howling of their neighbors and the banging of food buckets on the bars.

The first signs of fever had been expected to appear in the other captives within ten minutes of injection. Fifteen had already passed. That brought into question the basic procedure he had employed. Perhaps the measurements of viral concentration in the one-eyed man’s blood were incorrect and they had actually needed a much higher volume dose. A treble-or quadruple-sized injection?

It was too late to fix that.

Then he had an even more depressing thought: that during the process of replicating inside the one-eyed man’s body the viral tool might have been somehow altered, disabled or functionally weakened—something that normally only happened after many hundreds of thousands of sequential infections. Perhaps he had inherited or acquired a deactivation mechanism that caused the virus to lose its virulence. It was the kind of information that might be uncovered in an autopsy.

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