Maze Master by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Author:Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 34

OCTOBER 19. 0400 HOURS. ABOARD THE USS MEAD.

The small cramped lab gleamed around Maris, the walls too white, the stainless steel tables and equipment too reflective. Military doctors hurried around her, checking monitors, speaking in low ominous tones. She saw the doctors’ movements reflected in the shiny tabletop where she sat hunched over her microscope. When she took a deep breath, the room smelled astringent, having been recently sterilized for the thousandth time that day. Though they placed the dying in a quarantine camp onshore, a few experimental cases moaned or wept in the room next door.

Private Madison, their guard, stood outside the door watching nervously as a soldier was pushed by on a gurney. They’d strapped the man down, but he kept crying, “Stop! Let me die! Don’t experiment on me! Just let me die. Please!”

Maris gritted her teeth harder. Being here was far more agonizing than she’d thought it would be. How did the meager medical staff do it? Day after day, watching people die and knowing there was nothing they could do to help them? She could see it in the doctors’ and nurses’ eyes when they shouldered past her to look at the monitors displaying the latest information from their testing programs. They came into the room, leaned over the computers, then all the strength seemed to drain from their bodies. For a time, they just stood with their eyes closed, as though they couldn’t bear to look at the results any longer.

Maris swiveled around on her stool when the medic, Corporal Janus, walked back into the room holding two cups of coffee. Dressed in a white plastic jumpsuit, he had red hair and large freckles.

“God bless you,” Maris said as she took one from his extended hand. “I’m half blind from staring into this microscope. I need a break.”

“And coffee is the one thing there’s still plenty of, so there’s more when that’s gone.”

Janus sank down atop the stainless steel stool in front of the glowing computer screen where he’d been working; it filled one corner of the lab. Glancing at his screen, he said, “Still correlating data. It’s taking a long time.”

Janus took a drink of coffee and let his gaze drift around the room. Fatigue lay in every line of his face. “Speaking of data, have you had a chance to wade through all the Leipzig documents?”

“About half of it. There’s a lot there.” Maris glanced at the foot-high stack of papers. “I’ve been concentrating on trying to replicate their most important results, but I am confused by many of the notations in the reports.”

“Like what?”

Maris lifted her coffee and sipped it. It tasted wonderful. “The first thing that struck me was the names. Cozeba told us this new information came from a German scientific team in Leipzig, where I’m stationed. I work with the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology all the time, but I don’t recognize any of the researchers’ names.”

Janus shrugged. “It may have been a highly classified project related to bioweapons research.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.