A Matter of Blood by Andi Marquette

Author:Andi Marquette [Marquette, Andi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Lesbian, Gay, (v4.0), Science Fiction, Adventure
ISBN: 9781934452561
Amazon: 1934452564
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company
Published: 2010-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

10

Kai stared at the vidscreen, which relayed information from a series of cameras positioned around a one-acre plot in the unclaimed territory. Here, in the lab facilities that the Coalition had constructed in accordance with their latest project, they were protected from contamination even though they were located within the area’s boundaries. She’d been here since after breakfast, touring the nerve center of the latest Coalition plot.

And Meli, meanwhile, was making nice at Evoran’s gathering. Given the choice, Kai would have preferred sitting through religious rituals and engaging in mundane chatter with people she either didn’t know, hadn’t seen in a while, and probably would not see again. Anything but more time spent with Andris Sorreth and Coalition machinations.

“There. Do you see?” Sorreth pointed at the upper right corner of the screen. “Show me that area,” he said over his shoulder to Bal. She made the appropriate adjustment at her control panel, and the area of the screen at which he had pointed enlarged. “Yes. There’s one.”

Kai studied the object, and as she did so, Bal brought it front and center. A worm-like creature, light gray in color. It moved sluggishly across the screen.

“It’ll live about forty-eight hours,” Sorreth said. “Quite a feat, considering no one prior to this has ever been able to cultivate them off Sentinel.” For once, his voice didn’t carry the smugness that had marked most of his pronouncements during the past three hours.

“Why doesn’t it live longer?” Kai asked, not taking her eyes from the screen. The worm itself, she had been told, was barely two millimeters in length at this stage of its development. But on the screen, it looked much larger. Hundreds of cilia moved like seaweed in an ocean as it propelled itself over the soil. It looked like a maggot with legs, she thought, but that didn’t repulse her. What horrified her—though she’d never show it—was that the Coalition was actually designing a biological weapon not forty miles from the northern edge of her family’s holdings. Diabolical. And so arrogant, to presume that something like this could be contained. Hadn’t history demonstrated that containment was only temporary?

“We don’t have the soil composition just right,” Sorreth said in response to her question. “We have two samples, barely enough to line your palm. So we must be sparing with our analyses, some of which require degradation.”

“How can something like this survive in that environment?”

She turned then to address him directly. The unclaimed territory had toxicity levels so high that even skirting it without protection resulted in illness and, in some cases, death. So far, Tinsdale had remained untainted, but her father had erected cleaners at five hundred yard intervals five miles from the southernmost reach of the unclaimed territory. The line of cleaners stretched for nearly thirty miles west to east, squat tan-colored orbs that blended into the landscape. She and Meli had learned as very young children to stay well south of them.

“It’s evolved for that. It adapted to the soils on

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