Quantum Synapse by Russell Blake

Author:Russell Blake [Blake, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

Detroit, Michigan

Bern Thue, the head of the North American faction of the Tribe, parked outside a run-down warehouse in an industrial area of Detroit bordered on all sides by slums that rivaled the worst shanty towns in Mumbai or Rio, where private armies operated by warlords ran the neighborhoods and meted out their versions of justice, or death, with impunity. He strode hurriedly to the barred gate that enclosed the drive, the grounds on either side overgrown with weeds and littered with garbage, and nodded to a lone security guard, who sat behind bulletproof glass in a bunker that could have withstood a direct artillery strike.

The gate creaked open and Bern made his way to the main building, noting the darkened cavities where the window glass had been long ago broken by vandals. At the front door, he unlocked a rusting box mounted by the heavy steel slab and peered into a retinal scanner that affirmed his identity.

Bern surveyed the empty street, his battered economy sedan the only vehicle there now that night was falling, and then turned, pushed the door open, and stepped into a filthy hall that reeked of stale urine and rot. He continued past the discarded syringes and empty port wine bottles to the warehouse floor, where piles of decaying pallets in disorderly piles littered the gloomy interior.

On the far side of the building, he stopped in front of a broken-down forklift and reached beneath the seat and pulled a lever. The vehicle slid to the side on silent tracks, and a stairway appeared beneath it, illuminated in a greenish glow from lights that rimmed the steps. He descended a story and pressed a button on the wall, and the forklift returned to its original position. Another retinal scanner identified him, and a panel rolled to the side, bathing the landing in bright white light.

Bern stepped through the opening into a fully outfitted lab with a half dozen techs in head-to-toe white at workstations. A gaunt woman barely five feet tall approached him, and they embraced. He held her at arm’s length and smiled.

“Susan, tell me you have good news.”

She frowned and shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Bern. We thought we had something, but when we tried to confirm the results, the virus had already mutated. It must have some sort of properties we haven’t seen before that serve as a kind of anti-vaccine.”

“I don’t understand. We took the samples from their facility, and I personally removed it from the drone the extraction team used, so it hasn’t been tampered with. What’s the problem?”

“We’d normally reverse engineer the virus, and that would be that. But it isn’t cooperating. Every time we think we’ve successfully sequenced it, it changes. We’re also seeing that on the first version that’s currently in release. They must have tech that enabled them to create a rapidly mutating variant so that no vaccine could be produced. We’ve seen early research that hinted at this capability, but it’s still ten years from being well understood.

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